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DREAMTHORP 



ALEXANDER STRAHAN & C° 

London, 32 Ludgate Hill. 

Edinburgh, 35 Hanover Street. 

Glasgow, 1 Royal Bank Place. 



DREAMTHORP 

A BOOK OF ESSAYS WRITTEN IN 
THE COUNTRY 



BY 

ALEXANDER SMITH 

AUTHOR OF "A LIFE DRAMA," " CITY POEMS," ETC. 






LONDON 
STRAHAN & CO, 32 LUDGATE HILL 

1863 



v :k 



Ballantyne dr- Company, Printers, Edinburgh. 



CONTENTS. 



I. DREAMTHORP, 

> II. ON THE WRITING OF ESSAYS, . 

III. ON DEATH AND THE FEAR OF DYING, 

IV. WILLIAM DUNBAR, . 
V. A lark's FLIGHT, . 

VI. CHRISTMAS, .... 

VII. MEN OF LETTERS, . 

VIII. ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A MAN 
HIMSELF, .... 

IX. A SHELF IN MY BOOKCASE, 

X. GEOFFREY CHAUCER, 

XI. BOOKS AND GARDENS, 

XII. ON VAGABONDS, 



TO 



PAGE 
I 

21 

66 

93 

113 

138 

167 

is? 

211 
246 
269 



DREAMTHORP 



DREAMTHORP. 

XT matters not to relate how or when I became a 
denizen of Dreamthorp ; it will be sufficient to 
say that I am not a born native, but that I came to 
reside in it a good while ago now. The several towns 
and villages in which, in my time, I have pitched a 
tent did not please, for one obscure reason or another : 
this one was too large, t' other Joo small ; but when, 
on a summer evening about the hour of eight, I first 
beheld Dreamthorp, with its westward-looking win- 
dows painted by sunset, its children playing in the 
single straggling street, the mothers knitting at the 
open doors, the fathers standing about in long white 
blouses, chatting or smoking ; the great tower of the 
ruined castle rising high into the rosy air, with a 
whole troop of swallows — by distance made as small 
as gnats — skimming about its rents and fissures; — 
when I first beheld all this, I felt instinctively that 
my knapsack might be taken off my shoulders, that 
my tired feet might wander no more, that at last, on 
the planet, I had found a home. From that evening 
I have dwelt here, and the only journey I am like 



2 Dreamthorp. 

now to make, is the very inconsiderable one, so far 
at least as distance is concerned, from the house in 
which I live to the graveyard beside the ruined castle. 
There, with the former inhabitants of the place, I trust 
to 'sleep quietly enough, and nature will draw over 
our heads her coverlet of green sod, and tenderly 
tuck us in, as a mother her sleeping ones, so that no 
sound from the world shall ever reach us, and no sor- 
row trouble us any more. 

The village stands far inland ; and the streams that 
trot through the soft green valleys all about have as 
little knowledge of the sea, as the three-years' child 
of the storms and passions of manhood. The sur- 
rounding country is smooth and green, full of undula- 
tions ; and pleasant country roads strike through it in 
every direction, bound for distant towns and villages, 
yet in no hurry to reach them. On these roads the 
lark in summer is continually heard ; nests are plenti- 
ful in the hedges and dry ditches ; and on the grassy 
banks, and at the feet of the bowed dikes, the blue- 
eyed speedwell smiles its benison on the passing 
wayfarer. On these roads you may walk for a year 
and encounter nothing more remarkable than the 
country cart, troops of tawny children from the 
woods, laden with primroses, and at long intervals — 
for people in this district live to a ripe age — a black 
funeral creeping in from some remote hamlet; and to 
this last the people reverently doff their hats and 
stand aside. Death does not walk about here often, 



Dreamthorp. 3 

but when he does, he receives as much respect as the 
squire himself. Everything round one is unhurried, 
quiet, moss-grown, and orderly. Season follows in 
the track of season, and one year can hardly be dis- 
tinguished from another. Time should be measured 
here by the silent dial, rather than by the ticking 
clock, or by the chimes of the church. Dreamthorp 
can boast of a respectable antiquity, and in it the 
trade of the builder is unknown. Ever since I re- 
member, not a single stone has been laid on the top 
of another. The castle, inhabited now by jackdaws 
and starlings, is old j the chapel which adjoins it is 
older still ; and the lake behind both, and in which 
their shadows sleep, is, I suppose, as old as Adam. 
A fountain in the market-place, all mouths and faces 
and curious arabesques, — as dry, however, as the 
castle moat, — has a tradition connected with it ; and 
a great noble riding through the street one day several 
hundred years ago, was shot from a window by a man 
whom he had injured. The death of this noble is the 
chief link which connects the place with authentic 
history. The houses are old, and remote dates may 
yet be deciphered on the stones above the doors ; the- 
apple-trees are mossed and ancient ; countless genera- 
tions of sparrows have bred in the thatched roofs, and 
thereon have chirped out their lives. In every room 
of the place men have been born, men have died. 
On Dreamthorp centuries have fallen, and have left 
no more trace than have last winter's snowflakes. 



4 Dreamthorp. 

This commonplace sequence and flowing on of life is 
immeasurably affecting. That winter morning when 
Charles lost his head in front of the banqueting-hall 
of his own palace, the icicles hung from the eaves of 
the houses here, and the clown kicked the snowballs 
from his clouted shoon, and thought but of his sup- 
per when, at three o'clock, the red sun set in the 
purple mist. On that Sunday in June while Waterloo 
was going on, the gossips, after morning service, stood 
on the country roads discussing agricultural pros- 
pects, without the slightest suspicion that the day 
passing over their heads would be a famous one in 
the calendar. Battles have been fought, kings have 
died, history has transacted itself; but, all unheeding 
and untouched, Dreamthorp has watched apple-trees 
redden, and wheat ripen, and smoked its pipe, and 
quaffed its mug of beer, and rejoiced over its new- 
born children, and with proper solemnity carried its 
dead to the churchyard. As I gaze on the village of 
my adoption, I think of many things very far re- 
moved, and seem to get closer to them. The last 
setting sun that Shakspeare saw reddened the win- 
dows here, and struck warmly on the faces of the 
hinds coming home from the fields. The mighty 
storm that raged while Cromwell lay a-dying made all 
the oak-woods groan round about here, and tore the 
thatch from the very roofs I gaze upon. When I 
think of this, I can almost, so to speak, lay my hand 
on Shakspeare and on Cromwell. These poor walls 



Dreamthorp. 5 

were contemporaries of both, and I find something 
affecting in the thought. The mere soil is, of course, 
far older than either, but it does not touch one in the 
same way. A wall is the creation of a human hand, 
the soil is not. 

This place suits my whim, and I like it better year 
after year. As with everything else, since I began to 
love it I find it gradually growing beautiful. Dream- 
thorp — a castle, a chapel, a lake, a straggling strip of 
gray houses, with a blue film of smoke over all — lies 
embosomed in emerald. Summer, with its daisies, 
runs up to every cottage door. From the little height 
where I am now sitting, I see it beneath me. Nothing 
could be more peaceful. The wind and the birds fly 
over it. A passing sunbeam makes brilliant a white 
gable-end, and brings out the colours of the blossomed 
apple-tree beyond, and disappears. I see figures in the 
street, but hear them not. The hands on the church 
clock seem always pointing to one hour. Time has 
fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. I make a 
frame of my fingers, and look at my picture. On the 
walls of the next Academy's Exhibition will hang 
nothing half so beautiful ! 

My village is, I think, a special favourite of sum- 
mer's. Every window-sill in it she touches with 
colour and fragrance ; everywhere she wakens the 
drowsy murmurs of the hives ; every place she scents 
with apple-blossom. Traces of her hand are to be 
seen on the weir beside the ruined mill; and even 
the canal, along which the barges come and go, has a 



6 Dreamthorp. 

great white water-lily asleep on its olive-coloured 
face. Never was velvet on a monarch's robe so gor- 
geous as the green mosses that be-ruff the roofs of 
farm and cottage, when the sunbeam slants on them 
and goes. The old road out towards the common, 
and the hoary dikes that might have been built 
in the reign of Alfred, have not been forgotten by the 
generous adorning season; for every fissure has its 
mossy cushion, and the old blocks themselves are 
washed by the loveliest gray -green lichens in the 
world, and the large loose stones lying on the ground 
have gathered to themselves the peacefulest mossy 
coverings. Some of these have not been disturbed 
for a century. Summer has adorned my village as 
gaily, and taken as much pleasure in the task, as the 
people of old, when Elizabeth was queen, took in the 
adornment of the May-pole against a summer festival. 
And, just think, not only Dreamthorp, but every Eng- 
lish village she has made beautiful after one fashion 
or another — making vivid green the hill slope on 
which straggling white Welsh hamlets hang right op- 
posite the sea ; drowning in apple-blossom the red 
Sussex ones in the fat valley. And think, once more, 
every spear of grass in England she has touched with 
a livelier green ; the crest of every bird she has bur- 
nished ; every old wall between the four seas has re- 
ceived her mossy and licheny attentions; every nook 
in every forest she has sown with pale flowers, every 
marsh she has dashed with the fires of the marigold. 
And in the wonderful night the moon knows, she 



Dreamthorp. 7 

hangs — the planet on which so many millions of us 
fight, and sin, and agonise, and die — a sphere of 
glow-worm light. 

Having discoursed so long about Dreamthorp, it is 
but fair that I should now introduce you to her lions. 
These are, for the most part, of a commonplace kind; 
and I am afraid that, if you wish to find romance in 
them, you must bring it with you. I might speak of 
the old church-tower, or of the church-yard beneath 
it, in which the village holds its dead, each resting- 
place marked by a simple stone, on which is inscribed 
the name and age of the sleeper, and a Scripture 
text beneath, in which live our hopes of immortality. 
But, on the whole, perhaps it will be better to begin 
with the canal, which wears on its olive-coloured face 
the big white water-lily already chronicled. Such a 
secluded place is Dreamthorp that the railway does 
not come near, and the canal is the only thing that 
connects it with the world. It stands high, and from 
it the undulating country may be seen stretching away 
into the gray of distance, with hills and woods, and 
stains of smoke which mark the sites of villages. 
Ever}- now and then a horse comes staggering along 
the towing-path, trailing a sleepy barge filled with 
merchandise. A quiet, indolent life these bargemen 
lead in the summer days. One lies stretched at his 
length on the sun-heated plank ; his comrade sits 
smoking in the little dog-hutch, which I suppose he 
calls a cabin. Silently they come and go; silently 



8 Dreamthorp. 

the wooden bridge lifts to let them through. The 
horse stops at the bridge-house for a drink, and there 
I like to talk a little with the men. They serve in- 
stead of a newspaper, and retail with great willingness 
the news they have picked up in their progress from 
town to town. I am told they sometimes marvel who 
the old gentleman is who accosts them from beneath 
a huge umbrella in the sun, and that they think him 
either very wise or very foolish. Not in the least un- 
natural ! We are great friends, I believe — evidence 
of which they occasionally exhibit by requesting me 
to disburse a trifle for drink-money. This canal is a 
great haunt of mine of an evening. The water hardly 
invites one to bathe in it, and a delicate stomach 
might suspect the flavour of the eels caught therein ; 
yet, to my thinking, it is not in the least destitute of 
beauty. A barge trailing up through it in the sunset 
is a pretty sight ; and the heavenly crimsons and 
purples sleep quite lovingly upon its glossy ripples. 
Nor does the evening star disdain it, for as I walk 
along I see it mirrored therein as clearly as in the 
waters of the Mediterranean itself. 

The old castle and chapel already alluded to are, 
perhaps, to a stranger, the points of attraction in 
Dreamthorp. Back from the houses is the lake, on 
the green sloping banks of which, with broken win- 
dows and tombs, the ruins stand. As it is noon, and 
the weather is warm, let us go and sit on a turret. 
Here, on these very steps, as old ballads tell, a queen 



Dreamthorp. 9 

sat once, day after day, looking southward for the 
light of returning spears. I bethink me that yesterday, 
no further gone, I went to visit a consumptive shoe- 
maker; seated here I can single out his very house, 
nay, the very window of the room in which he is lying. 
On that straw roof might the raven alight, and flap his 
sable wings. There, at this moment, is the supreme 
tragedy being enacted. A woman is weeping there, 
and little children are looking on with a sore bewilder- 
ment. Before nightfall the poor peaked face of the 
bowed artisan will have gathered its ineffable peace, 
and the widow will be led away from the bedside by 
the tenderness of neighbours, and the cries of the 
orphan brood will be stilled. And yet this present 
indubitable suffering and loss does not touch me like 
the sorrow of the woman of the ballad, the phantom 
probably of a minstrel's brain. The shoemaker will 
be forgotten — I shall be forgotten; and long after 
visitors will sit here and look out on the landscape 
and murmur the simple lines. But why do death and 
dying obtrude themselves at the present moment ? 
On the turret opposite, about the distance of a gun- 
shot, is as pretty a sight as eye could wish to see. 
Two young people, strangers apparently, have come 
to visit the ruin. Neither the ballad queen, nor the 
shoemaker down yonder, whose respirations are getting 
shorter and shorter, touches them in the least. They 
are merry and happy, and the graybeard turret has 
not the heart to thrust a foolish moral upon them. 



io Dreamthorp. 

They would not thank him if he did, I daresay. Per- 
haps they could not understand him. Time enough ! 
Twenty years hence they will be able to sit down at 
his feet, and count griefs with him, and tell him tale 
for tale. Human hearts get ruinous in so much less 
time than stone walls and towers. See, the young man 
has thrown himself down at the girl's feet on a little 
space of grass. In her scarlet cloak she looks like a 
blossom springing out of a crevice on the ruined steps. 
He gives her a flower, and she bows her face down 
over it almost to her knees. What did the flower say % 
Is it to hide a blush % He looks delighted ; and I 
almost fancy I see a proud colour on his brow. As I 
gaze, these young people make for me a perfect idyl. 
The generous, ungrudging sun, the melancholy ruin, 
decked, like mad Lear, with the flowers and ivies of 
forgetfulness and grief, and between them, sweet and 
evanescent, human truth and love ! 

Love ! — does it yet walk the world, or is it im- 
prisoned in poems and romances 1 Has not the 
circulating library become the sole home of the pas- 
sion 1 ? Is love not become the exclusive property 
of novelists and playwrights, to be used by them 
only for professional purposes 1 Surely, if the men I 
see are lovers, or ever have been lovers, they would 
be nobler than they are. The knowledge that he is 
beloved should — must make a man tender, gentle, 
upright, pure. While yet a youngster in a jacket, I 
can remember falling desperately in love with a young 



Dreamthorp. 1 1 

lady several years my senior, — after the fashion of 
youngsters in jackets. Could I have fibbed in these 
days % Could I have betrayed a comrade 1 Could I 
have stolen eggs or callow young from the nest ? Could 
I have stood quietly by and seen the weak or the 
maimed bullied % Nay, verily ! In these absurd days 
she lighted up the whole world for me. To sit in the 
same room with her was like the happiness of per- 
petual holiday ; when she asked me to run a message 
for her, or to do any, the slightest, service for her, I 
felt as if a patent of nobility were conferred on me. I 
kept my passion to myself, like a cake, and nibbled 
it in private. Juliet was several years my senior, and 
had a lover — was, in point of fact, actually engaged ; 
and, in looking back, I can remember I was too 
much in love to feel the slightest twinge of jealousy. 
I remember also seeing Romeo for the first time, and 
thinking him a greater man than Csesar or Napoleon. 
The worth I credited him with, the cleverness, the 
goodness, the everything ! He awed me by his man- 
ner and bearing. He accepted that girl's love coolly 
and as a matter of course : it put him no more about 
than a crown and sceptre puts about a king. What I 
would have given my life to possess — being only four- 
teen, it was not much to part with after all — he wore 
lightly, as he wore his gloves or his cane. It did not 
seem a bit too good for him. His self-possession 
appalled me. If I had seen him take the sun out of 
the sky, and put it into his breeches' pocket, I don't 



1 2 Dreamthorp. 

think I should have been in the least degree sur- 
prised. Well, years after, when I had discarded my 
passion with my jacket, I have assisted this middle- 
aged Romeo home from a roystering wine-party, and 
heard him hiccup out his marital annoyances, with 
the strangest remembrances of old times, and the 
strangest deductions therefrom. Did that man with 
the idiotic laugh and the blurred utterance ever love % 
Was he ever capable of loving 1 I protest I have my 
doubts. But where are my young people ? Gone ! 
So it is always. We begin to moralise and look wise, 
and Beauty, who is something of a coquette, and of 
an exacting turn of mind, and likes attentions, gets 
disgusted with our wisdom or our stupidity, and goes 
off in a huff. Let the baggage go ! 

The ruined chapel adjoins the ruined castle on 
which I am now sitting, and is evidently a building of 
much older date. It is a mere shell now. It is quite 
roofless, ivy covers it in part ; the stone tracery of the 
great western window is yet intact, but the coloured 
glass is gone with the splendid vestments of the abbot, 
the fuming incense, the chanting choirs, and the 
patient, sad-eyed monks, who muttered Aves, shrived 
guilt, and illuminated missals. Time was when this 
place breathed actual benedictions, and was a home 
of active peace. At present it is visited only by the 
stranger, and delights but the antiquary. The village 
people have so little respect for it, that they do not 
even consider it haunted. There are several tombs in 



Dreamthorp. 1 3 

the interior bearing knights' escutcheons, which time 
has sadly defaced. The dust you stand upon is noble. 
Earls have been brought here in dinted mail from 
battle, and earls' wives from the pangs of child-bear- 
ing. The last trumpet will break the slumber of a 
right honourable company. One of the tombs — the 
most perfect of all in point of preservation — I look at 
often, and try to conjecture what it commemorates. 
With all my fancies, I can get no further than the old 
story of love and death. There, on the slab, the 
white figures sleep ; marble hands, folded in prayer, 
on marble breasts. And I like to think that he was 
brave, she beautiful; that although the monument 
is worn by time, and sullied by the stains of the 
weather, the qualities which it commemorates — hus- 
bandly and wifely affection, courtesy, courage, knightly 
scorn of wrong and falsehood, meekness, penitence, 
charity — are existing yet somewhere, recognisable 
by each other. The man who in this world can keep 
the whiteness of his soul, is not likely to lose it in any 
other. 

In summer I spent a good deal of time floating 
about the lake. The landing-place to which my boat 
is tethered is ruinous, like the chapel and palace, and 
my embarkation causes quite a stir in the sleepy little 
village. Small boys leave their games and mud-pies, 
and gather round in silence ; they have seen me get 
off a hundred times, but their interest in the matter 
seems always new. Not unfrequently an idle cobbler, 



1 4 Dreamthorp. 

in red nightcap and leathern apron, leans on a broken 
stile, and honours my proceedings with his attention. 
I shoot off, and the human knot dissolves. The lake 
contains three islands, each with a solitary tree, and 
on these islands the swans breed. I feed the birds 
daily with bits of bread. See, one comes gliding to- 
wards me, with superbly arched neck, to receive its 
customary alms ! How wildly beautiful its motions ! 
How haughtily it begs ! The green pasture lands 
run down to the edge of the water, and into it in the 
afternoons the red kine wade and stand knee-deep in 
their shadows, surrounded by troops of flies. Patiently 
the honest creatures abide the attacks of their tor- 
mentors. Now one swishes itself with its tail, — now 
its neighbour flaps a huge ear. I draw my oars along- 
side, and let my boat float at its own will. The soft 
blue heavenly abysses, the wandering streams of va- 
pour, the long beaches of rippled cloud, are glassed 
and repeated in the lake. Dreamthorp is silent as a 
picture, the voices of the children are mute ; and the 
smoke from the houses, the blue pillars all sloping 
in one angle, float upward as if in sleep. Grave and 
stern the old castle rises from its emerald banks, 
which long ago came down to the lake in terrace on 
ten'ace, gay with fruits and flowers, and with stone 
nymph and satyrs hid in every nook. Silent and 
empty enough to-day ! A flock of daws suddenly 
bursts out from a turret, and round and round they 
wheel, as if in panic. Has some great scandal ex- 



Dreamthorp. 1 5 

ploded? Has a conspiracy been discovered'? Has 
a revolution broken out % The excitement has sub- 
sided, and one of them, perched on the old banner- 
staff, chatters confidentially to himself as he, sideways, 
eyes the world beneath him. Floating about thus, 
time passes swiftly, for, before I know where I am, 
the kine have withdrawn from the lake to couch on 
the herbage, while one on a little height is lowing for 
the milkmaid and her pails. Along the road I see 
the labourers coming home for supper, while the sun 
setting behind me makes the village windows blaze ; 
and so I take out my oars, and pull leisurely through 
waters faintly flushed with evening colours. 

I do not think that Mr Buckle could have written 
his " History of Civilisation " in Dreamthorp, because 
in it books, conversation, and the other appurtenances 
of intellectual life, are not to be procured. I am ac- 
quainted with birds, and the building of nests — with 
wild-flowers, and the seasons in which they blow, — 
but with the big world far away, with what men and 
women are thinking, and doing, and saying, I am ac- 
quainted only through the Thnes, and the occasional 
magazine or review, sent by friends whom I have not 
looked upon for years, but by whom, it seems, I am 
not yet forgotten. The village has but few intellec- 
tual wants, and the intellectual supply is strictly 
measured by the demand. Still there is something. 
Down in the village, and opposite the curiously-carved 
fountain, is a schoolroom which can accommodate a 



1 6 Dreamthorp. 

couple of hundred people on a pinch. There are our 
public meetings held. Musical entertainments have 
been given there by a single performer. In that 
schoolroom last winter an American biologist terrified 
the villagers, and, to their simple understandings, 
mingled up the next world with this. Now and again 
some rare bird of an itinerant lecturer covers dead 
walls with posters, yellow and blue, and to that 
schoolroom we flock to hear him. His rounded 
periods the eloquent gentleman devolves amidst a 
respectful silence. His audience do not understand 
him, but they see that the clergyman does, and the 
doctor does ; and so they are content, and look as 
attentive and wise as possible. Then, in connexion 
with the schoolroom, there is a public library, where 
books are exchanged once a month. This library is 
a kind of Greenwich Hospital for disabled novels 
and romances. Each of these books has been in 
the wars ; some are unquestionable antiques. The 
tears of three generations have fallen upon their 
dusky pages. The heroes and the heroines are of 
another age than ours. Sir Charles Grandison is 
standing with his hat under his arm. Tom Jones 
plops from the tree into the water, to the infinite 
distress of Sophia. Moses comes home from market 
with his stock of shagreen spectacles. Lovers, warriors, 
and villains, — as dead to the present generation of 
readers as Cambyses, — are weeping, fighting, and in- 
triguing. These books, tattered and torn as they are, 



Dreamthorp. 1 7 

are read with delight to-day. The viands are celestial 
if set forth on a dingy table-cloth. The gaps and 
chasms which occur in pathetic or perilous chapters 
are felt to be personal calamities. It is with a certain 
feeling of tenderness that I look upon these books ; I 
think of the dead fingers that have turned over the 
leaves, of the dead eyes that have travelled along the 
lines. An old novel has a history of its own. When 
fresh and new, and before it had breathed its secret, 
it lay on my lady's table. She killed the weary day 
with it, and when night came it was placed beneath 
her pillow. At the sea-side a couple of foolish heads 
have bent over it, hands have touched and tingled, 
and it has heard vows and protestations as passionate 
as any its pages contained. Coming down in the 
world, Cinderella in the kitchen has blubbered over it 
by the light of a surreptitious candle, conceiving herself 
the while the magnificent Georgiana, and Lord Mor- 
daunt, Georgiana's lover, the pot-boy round the corner. 
Tied up with many a dingy brother, the auctioneer 
knocks the bundle down to the bidder of a few pence, 
and it finds its way to the quiet cove of some village 
library, where with some difficulty — as if from want of 
teeth — and with numerous interruptions — as if from 
lack of memory — it tells its old stories, and wakes 
tears, and blushes, and laughter as of yore. Thus it 
spends its age, and in a few years it will become 
unintelligible, and then, in the dust-bin, like poor 
human mortals in the grave, it will rest from all its 



1 8 Dreamthorp. 

labours. It is impossible to estimate the benefit 
which such books have conferred. How often have 
they loosed the chain of circumstance ! What unfa- 
miliar tears — what unfamiliar laughter they have 
caused ! What chivalry and tenderness they have 
infused into rustic loves ! Of what weary hours they 
have cheated and beguiled their readers ! The big, 
solemn history-books are in excellent preservation ; 
the story-books are defaced and frayed, and their out- 
of-elbows' condition is their pride, and the best justifi- 
cation of their existence. They are tashed, as roses 
are, by being eagerly handled and smelt. I observe, 
too, that the most ancient romances are not in every 
case the most severely worn. It is the pace that tells 
in horses, men, and books. There are Nestors 
wonderfully hale ; there are juveniles in a state 
of dilapidation. One of the youngest books, "The 
Old Curiosity Shop," is absolutely falling to pieces. 
That book, like Italy, is possessor of the fatal gift ; 
but happily, in its case, everything can be rectified 
by a new edition. We have buried warriors and 
poets, princes and queens, but no one of these was 
followed to the grave by sincerer mourners than was 
little Nell. 

Besides the itinerant lecturer, and the permanent 
library, we have the Sunday sermon. These sum up 
the intellectual aids and furtherances of the whole 
place. We have a church and a chapel, and I attend 
both. The Dreamthorp people are Dissenters, for 



Dreamthorp. 1 9 

the most part ; why, I never could understand ; be- 
cause dissent implies a certain intellectual effort. But 
Dissenters they are, and Dissenters they are likely to 
remain. In an ungainly building, rilled with hard 
gaunt pews, without an organ, without a touch of 
colour in the windows, with nothing to stir the im- 
agination or the devotional sense, the simple people 
worship. On Sunday, they are put upon a diet of 
spiritual bread-and-water. Personally, I should desire 
more generous food. But the labouring people listen 
attentively, till once they fall asleep, and they wake 
up to receive the benediction with a feeling of hav- 
ing done their duty. They know they ought to go 
to chapel, and they go. I go likewise, from habit, 
although I have long ago lost the power of following 
a discourse. In my pew, and whilst the clergyman 
is going on, I think of the strangest things— of the 
tree at the window, of the congregation of the dead 
outside, of the wheat-fields and the corn-fields be- 
yond and all around. And the odd thing is, that it 
is during sermon only that my mind flies off at a 
tangent and busies itself with things removed from 
the place and the circumstances. Whenever it is 
finished fancy returns from her wanderings, and I 
am alive to the objects around me. The clergy- 
man knows my humour, and is good Christian 
enough to forgive me ; and he smiles good-humouredly 
when I ask him to let me have the chapel keys, 
that I may enter, when in the mood, and preach a 



20 Dreamthorp. 

sermon to myself. To my mind, an empty chapel 
is impressive ; a crowded one, comparatively a com- 
monplace affair. Alone, I could choose my own text, 
and my silent discourse would not be without its 
practical applications. 

An idle life I live in this place, as the world 
counts it ; but then I have the satisfaction of differing 
from the world as to the meaning of idleness. A 
windmill twirling its arms all day is admirable only 
when there is corn to grind. Twirling its arms for 
the mere barren pleasure of twirling them, or for the 
sake of looking busy, does not deserve any rapturous 
paean of praise. I must be made happy after my own 
fashion, not after the fashion of other people. Here 
I can live as I please, here I can throw the reins on 
the neck of my whim. Here I play with my own 
thoughts j here I ripen for the grave. 



ON THE WRITING OF ESSAYS. 

r HAVE already described my environments and 
my mode of life, and out of both I contrive 
to extract a very tolerable amount of satisfaction. 
Love in a cottage, with a broken window to let in 
the rain, is not my idea of comfort ; no more is Dig- 
nity, walking forth richly clad, to whom every head 
uncovers, every knee grows supple. Bruin in winter- 
time fondly sucking his own paws, loses flesh; and 
love, feeding upon itself, dies of inanition. Take 
the candle of death in your hand, and walk through 
the stately galleries of the world, and their splendid 
furniture and array are as the tinsel armour and 
pasteboard goblets of a penny theatre ; fame is but 
an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy 
blazon on a coffin lid. We argue fiercely about hap- 
piness. One insists that she is found in the cottage 
which the hawthorn shades. Another that she is a 
lady of fashion, and treads on cloth of gold. Wisdom, 
listening to both, shakes a white head, and considers 
that " a good deal may be said on both sides." 
There is a wise saying to the effect that " a man 



22 On the Writing of Essays. 

can eat no more than he can hold." Every man gets 
about the same satisfaction out of life. Mr Suddle- 
chops, the barber of Seven Dials, is as happy as Alex- 
ander at the head of his legions. The business of the 
one is to depopulate kingdoms, the business of the 
other to reap beards seven days old ; but their rela- 
tive positions do not affect the question. The one 
works with razors and soap-lather, the other with 
battle-cries and well-greaved Greeks. The one of a 
Saturday night counts up his shabby gains and grum- 
bles ; the other on his Saturday night sits down and 
weeps for other worlds to conquer. The pence to Mr 
Suddlechops are as important as are the worlds to 
Alexander. Every condition of life has its peculiar 
advantages, and wisdom points these out and is con- 
tented with them. The varlet who sang — ■ 

" A king cannot swagger 
Or get drunk like a beggar, 
Nor be half so happy as I" — ■ 

had the soul of a philosopher in him. The harshness 
of the parlour is revenged at night in the servants' 
hall. The coarse rich man rates his domestic, but 
there is a thought in the domestic's brain, docile and 
respectful as he looks, which makes the matter equal, 
which would madden the rich man if he knew it — 
make him wince as with a shrewdest twinge of here- 
ditary gout. For insult and degradation are not 
without their peculiar solaces. You may spit upon 
Shylock's gaberdine, but the day comes when he de- 



On the Writing of Essays. 23 

mands his pound of flesh ; every blow, every insult, 
not without a certain satisfaction, he adds to the 
account running up against you in the day-book and 
ledger of his hate — which at the proper time he will 
ask you to discharge. Every way we look we see 
even-handed nature administering her laws of com- 
pensation. Grandeur has a heavy tax to pay. The 
usurper rolls along like a god, surrounded by his 
guards. He dazzles the crowd — all very fine ; but 
look beneath his splendid trappings and you see 
a shirt of mail, and beneath that a heart cowering in 
terror of an air-drawn dagger. Whom did the memory 
of Austerlitz most keenly sting? The beaten empe- 
rors % or the mighty Napoleon, dying like an untended 
watch-fire on St Helena 1 ? 

Giddy people may think the life I lead here staid 
and humdrum, but they are mistaken. It is true, I 
hear no concerts, save those in which the thrushes are 
performers in the spring mornings. I see no pictures, 
save those painted on the wide sky-canvas with the 
colours of sunrise and sunset. I attend neither rout 
nor ball ; I have no deeper dissipation than the tea- 
table ; I hear no more exciting scandal than quiet 
village gossip. Yet I enjoy my concerts more than 
I would the great London ones. I like the pictures I 
see, and think them better painted, too, than those 
which adorn the walls of the Royal Academy; and the 
village gossip is more after my turn of mind than the 
scandals that convulse the clubs. It is wonderful 



24 On the Writing of Essays. 

how the whole world reflects itself in the simple vil- 
lage life. The people around me are full of their own 
affairs and interests ; were they of imperial magni- 
tude, they could not be excited more strongly. Far- 
mer Worthy is anxious about the next market ; the 
likelihood of a fall in the price of butter and eggs 
hardly allows him to sleep o' nights. The village 
doctor — happily we have only one — skirrs hither and 
thither in his gig, as if man could neither die nor be 
born without his assistance. He is continually stand- 
ing on the confines of existence, welcoming the new 
comer, bidding farewell to the goer-away. And the 
robustious fellow who sits at the head of the table 
when the Jolly Swillers meet at the Blue Lion on Wed- 
nesday evenings is a great politician, sound of lung 
metal, and wields the village in the taproom, as my 
Lord Palmerston wields the nation in the House. His 
listeners think him a wiser personage than the Pre- 
mier, and he is inclined to lean to that opinion him- 
self. I find everything here that other men find in the 
big world. London is but a magnified Dreamthorp. 

And just as the Rev. Mr White took note of the 
ongoings of the seasons in and around Hampshire 
Selborne, watched the colonies of the rooks in the 
tall elms, looked after the swallows in the cottage and 
rectory eaves, played the affectionate spy on the pri- 
vate lives of chaffinch and hedge-sparrow, was eaves- 
dropper to the solitary cuckoo ; so here I keep eye 
and ear open ; take note of man, woman, and child ; 



On the Writing of Essays. 25 

find many a pregnant text imbedded in the common- 
place of village life ; and, out of what I see and hear, 
weave in my own room my essays as solitarily as the 
spider weaves his web in the darkened corner. The 
essay, as a literary form, resembles the lyric, in so far 
as it is moulded by some central mood — whimsical, 
serious, or satirical. Give the mood, and the essay, 
from the first sentence to the last, grows around 
it as the cocoon grows around the silkworm. The 
essay-writer is a chartered libertine, and a law unto 
himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern 
the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brood- 
ing meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires 
to start business with. Jacques, in " As You Like It," 
had the makings of a charming essayist. It is not 
the essayist's duty to inform, to build pathways 
through metaphysical morasses, to cancel abuses, any 
more than it is the duty of the poet to do these things. 
Incidentally he may do something in that way, just as 
the poet may, but it is not his duty, and should not 
be expected of him. Skylarks are primarily created 
to sing, although a whole choir of them may be 
baked in pies and brought to table ; they were born 
to make music, although they may incidentally stay 
the pangs of vulgar hunger. The essayist is a kind of 
poet in prose, and if questioned harshly as to his uses, 
he might be unable to render a better apology for his 
existence than a flower might. The essay should be 
pure literature as the poem is pure literature. The 



26 On the Writing of Essays. 

essayist wears a lance, but he cares more for the 
sharpness of its point than for the pennon that 
flutters on it, than for the banner of the captain 
under whom he serves. He plays with death as 
Hamlet plays with Yorick's skull, and he reads the 
morals — strangely stern, often, for such fragrant lodg- 
ing — which are folded up in the bosoms of roses. 
He has no pride, and is deficient in a sense of the 
congruity and fitness of things. He lifts a pebble 
from the ground, and puts it aside more carefully 
than any gem ; and on a nail in a cottage-door he 
will hang the mantle of his thought, heavily brocaded 
with the gold of rhetoric. He finds his way into 
the Elysian fields through portals the most shabby 
and commonplace. 

The essayist plays with his subject, now in whimsi- 
cal, now in grave, now in melancholy mood. He lies 
upon the idle grassy bank, like Jacques, letting the 
world flow past him, and from this thing and the 
other he extracts his mirth and his moralities. His 
main gift is an eye to discover the suggestiveness 
of common things ; to find a sermon in the most un- 
promising texts. Beyond the vital hint, the first step, , 
his discourses are not beholden to their titles. Let 
him take up the most trivial subject, and it will lead 
him away to the great questions over which the 
serious imagination loves to brood, — fortune, muta- 
bility, death, — just as inevitably as the runnel, trick- 
ling among the summer hills, on which sheep are 



On the Writing of Essays. 27 

bleating, leads you to the sea ; or as, turning down 
the first street you come to in the city, you are led 
finally, albeit by many an intricacy, out into the open 
country, with its waste places and its woods, where 
you are lost in a sense of strangeness and solitariness. 
The world is to the meditative man what the mulberry 
plant is to the silkworm. The essay-writer has no lack 
of subject-matter. He has the day that is passing 
over his head ; and, if unsatisfied with that, he has 
the world's six thousand years to depasture his gay or 
serious humour upon. I idle away my time here, and 
I am finding new subjects every hour. Everything I 
see or hear is an essay in bud. The world is every- 
where whispering essays, and one need only be the 
world's amanuensis. The proverbial expression which 
last evening the clown dropped as he trudged home- 
ward to supper, the light of the setting sun on his face, 
expands before me to a dozen pages. The coffin oi 
the pauper, which to-day I saw carried carelessly along, 
is as good a subject as the funeral procession of an 
emperor. Craped drum and banner add nothing to 
death; penury and disrespect take nothing away. 
Incontinently my thought moves like a slow-paced 
hearse with sable nodding plumes. Two rustic lovers, 
whispering between the darkening hedges, is as potent 
to project my mind into the tender passion as if I had 
seen Romeo touch the cheek of Juliet in the moon- 
light garden. Seeing a curly-headed child asleep in the 
sunshine before a cottage-door is sufficient excuse for 



28 On the Writing of Essays. 

a discourse on childhood ; quite as good as if I had 
seen infant Cain asleep in the lap of Eve with Adam 
looking on. A lark cannot rise to heaven without 
raising as many thoughts as there are notes in its song. 
Dawn cannot pour its white light on my village with- 
out starting from their dim lair a hundred reminis- 
cences ; nor can sunset burn above yonder trees 
in the west without attracting to itself the melan- 
choly of a life-time. When spring unfolds her green 
leaves I would be provoked to indite an essay on 
hope and youth, were it not that it is already writ in 
the carols of the birds ; and I might be tempted in 
autumn to improve the occasion, were it not for the 
rustle of the withered leaves as I walk through the 
woods. Compared with that simple music, the sad- 
dest-cadenced words have but a shallow meaning. 

The essayist who feeds his thoughts upon the seg- 
ment of the world which surrounds him cannot avoid 
being an egotist ; but then his egotism is not unpleas- 
ing. If he be without taint of boastfulness, of self- 
sufficiency, of hungry vanity, the world will not press 
the charge home. If a man discourses continually of 
his wines, his plate, his titled acquaintances, the num- 
ber and quality of his horses, his men-servants and 
maid-servants, he must discourse very skilfully indeed 
if he escapes being called a coxcomb. If a man 
speaks of death — tells you that the idea of it con- 
tinually haunts him, that he has the most insatiable 
curiosity as to death and dying, that his thought 



On the Writing of Essays. 29 

mines in churchyards like a " demon-mole"— no one 
is specially offended, and that this is a dull fellow is 
the hardest thing likely to be said of him. Only, the 
egotism that over-crows you is offensive, that exalts 
trifles and takes pleasure in them, that suggests supe- 
riority in matters of equipage and furniture ; and the 
egotism is offensive, because it runs counter to and 
jostles your self-complacency. The egotism which 
rises no higher than the grave is of a solitary and a 
hermit kind — it crosses no man's path, it disturbs 
no man's amour firopre. You may offend a man 
if you say you are as rich as he, as wise as he, as 
handsome as he. You offend no man if you tell him 
that, like him, you have to die. The king, in his 
crown and coronation robes, will allow the beggar to 
claim that relationship with him. To have to die is a 
distinction of which no man is proud. The speaking 
about one's self is not necessarily offensive. A modest, 
truthful man speaks better about himself than about 
anything else, and on that subject his speech is likely 
to be most profitable to his hearers. Certainly, there 
is no subject with which he is better acquainted, and 
on which he has a better title to be heard. And it is 
this egotism, this perpetual reference to self, in which 
the charm of the essayist resides. If a man is worth 
knowing at all, he is worth knowing well. The essayist 
gives you his thoughts, and lets you know, in addition, 
how he came by them. He has nothing to conceal ; 
he throws open his doors and windows, and lets him 



30 On the Writing of Essays. 

enter who will. You like to walk round peculiar or 
important men as you like to walk round a build- 
ing, to view it from different points, and in different 
lights. Of the essayist, when his mood is communi- 
cative, you obtain a full picture. You are made his 
contemporary and familiar friend. You enter into 
his humours and his seriousness. You are made heir 
of his whims, prejudices, and playfulness. You walk 
through the whole nature of him, as you walk through 
the streets of Pompeii, looking into the interior of 
stately mansions, reading the satirical scribblings on 
the walls. And the essayist's habit of not only giving 
you his thoughts, but telling you how he came by 
them, is interesting, because it shews you by what 
alchemy the ruder world becomes transmuted into the 
finer. We like to know the lineage of ideas, just as 
we like to know the lineage of great earls and swift 
race-horses. We like to know that the discovery of 
the law of gravitation was born of the fall of an 
apple in an English garden on a summer afternoon. 
Essays written after this fashion are racy of the soil 
in which they grow, as you taste the lava in the vines 
grown on the slopes of Etna, they say. There is a 
healthy Gascon flavour in Montaigne's Essays ; and 
Charles Lamb's are scented with the primroses of 
Covent Garden. 

The essayist does not usually appear early in the 
literary history of a country : he comes naturally after 
the poet and the chronicler. His habit of mind is 



On the Writing of assays. 31 

leisurely ; he does not write from any special stress of 
passionate impulse ; he does not create material so 
much as he comments upon material already existing. 
It is essential for him that books should have been 
written, and that they should, at least to some extent, 
have been read and digested. He is usually full of 
allusions and references, and these his reader must be 
able to follow and understand. And in this literary 
walk, as in most others, the giants came first : Mon- 
taigne and Lord Bacon were our earliest essayists, 
and, as yet, they are our best. In point of style, 
these essays are different from anything that could now 
be produced. Not only is the thinking different — the 
manner of setting forth the thinking is different also. 
We despair of reaching the thought, we despair equally 
of reaching the language. We can no more bring 
back their turns of sentence than we can bring back 
their tournaments. Montaigne, in his serious moods, 
has a curiously rich and intricate eloquence ; and 
Bacon's sentence bends beneath the weight of his 
thought, like a branch beneath the weight of its fruit. 
Bacon seems to have written his essays with Shak- 
speare's pen. There is a certain want of ease about 
the old writers which has an irresistible charm. The 
language flows like a stream over a pebbled bed, with 
propulsion, eddy, and sweet recoil — the pebbles, if re- 
tarding movement, giving ring and dimple to the sur- 
face, and breaking the whole into babbling music. 
There is a ceremoniousness in the mental habits of 



32 On the Writing of Essays. 

these ancients. Their intellectual garniture is pic- 
turesque, like the garniture of their bodies. Their 
thoughts are courtly and high mannered. A singular 
analogy exists between the personal attire of a period 
and its written style. The peaked beard, the starched 
collar, the quilted doublet, have their correspondences 
in the high sentence and elaborate ornament (worked 
upon the thought like figures upon tapestry) of Sidney 
and Spencer. In Pope's day men wore rapiers, and 
their weapons they carried with them into literature, 
and frequently unsheathed them too. They knew how 
to stab to the heart with an epigram. Style went out 
with the men who wore knee-breeches and buckles in 
their shoes. We write more easily now ; but in our 
easy writing there is ever a taint of flippancy: our 
writing is to theirs, what shooting-coat and wide-awake 
are to doublet and plumed hat. 

Montaigne and Bacon are our earliest and greatest 
essayists, and likeness and unlikeness exist between 
the men. Bacon was constitutionally the graver 
nature. He writes like one on whom presses the 
weight of affairs, and he approaches a subject always 
on its serious side. He does not play with it fantas- 
tically. He lives amongst great ideas, as with great 
nobles, with whom he dare not be too familiar. In 
the tone of his mind there is ever something imperial. 
When he writes on building, he speaks of a palace 
with spacious entrances, and courts, and banqueting- 
halls ; when he writes on gardens, he speaks of alleys 



On the Writing of Essays. 33 

and mounts, waste places and fountains, of a garden 
" which is indeed prince-like." To read over his table 
of contents, is like reading over a roll of peers' names. 
We have, taking them as they stand, essays treating 
Of Great Place, Of Boldness, Of Goodness, and Goodness 
of Nature, Of Nobility, Of Seditions and Troubles, Of 
Atheism, Of Superstition, Of Travel, Of Empire, Of 
Counsel, — a book plainly to lie in the closets of states- 
men and princes, and designed to nurture the noblest 
natures. Bacon always seems to write with his ermine 
on. Montaigne was different from all this. His table 
of contents reads in comparison like a medley, or a 
catalogue of an auction. He was quite as wise as 
Bacon ; he could look through men quite as clearly, 
and search them quite as narrowly; certain of his 
moods were quite as serious, and in one corner of his 
heart he kept a yet profounder melancholy ; but he 
was volatile, a humorist, and a gossip. He could 
be dignified enough on great occasions, but dignity 
and great occasions bored him. He could stand in 
the presence with propriety enough, but then he got 
out of the presence as rapidly as possible. When, in 
the thirty-eighth year of his age, he — somewhat world 
weary, and with more scars on his heart than he cared 
to discover — retired to his chateau, he placed his 
library " in the great tower overlooking the entrance 
to the court," and over the central rafter he inscribed 
in large letters the device — " I do not understand ; 
I pause ; I examine." When he began to write his 



34 On the Writing of Essays. 

Essays he had no great desire to shine as an author ; 
he wrote simply to relieve teeming heart and brain. 
The best method to lay the spectres of the mind is to 
commit them to paper. Speaking of the Essays, he 
says, " This book has a domestic and private object. 
It is intended for the use of my relations and friends ; 
so that, when they have lost me, which they will soon 
do, they may find in it some features of my condition 
and humours ; and by this means keep up more com- 
pletely, and in a more lively manner, the knowledge 
they have of me." In his Essays he meant to portray 
himself, his habits, his modes of thought, his opinions, 
what fruit of wisdom he had gathered from experience 
sweet and bitter \ and the task he has executed with 
wonderful fidelity. He does not make himself a 
hero. Cromwell would have his warts painted ; and 
Montaigne paints his, and paints them too with a certain 
fondness. He is perfectly tolerant of himself and of 
everybody else. Whatever be the subject, the writing 
flows on easy, equable, self-satisfied, almost always 
with a personal anecdote floating on the surface. Each 
event of his past life he considers a fact of nature • 
creditable or the reverse, there it is ; sometimes to be 
speculated upon, not in the least to be regretted. If 
it is worth nothing else, it may be made the subject 
of an essay, or, at least, be useful as an illustration. 
We have not only his thoughts, we see also how and 
from what they arose. When he presents you with a 
bouquet, you notice that the flowers have been plucked 



On the Writing of Essays, 35 

up by the roots, and to the roots a portion of the soil 
still adheres. On his daily life his Essays grew like 
lichens upon rocks. If a thing is useful to him, he 
is not squeamish as to where he picks it up. In his 
eyes there is nothing common or unclean -, and he 
accepts a favour as willingly from a beggar as from a 
prince. When it serves his purpose, he quotes a 
tavern catch, or the smart saying of a kitchen wench, 
with as much relish as the fine sentiment of a classical 
poet, or the gallant Ion mot of a king. Everything 
is important which relates to himself. That his 
moustache, if stroked with his perfumed glove, or 
handkerchief, will retain the odour a whole day, is 
related with as much gravity as the loss of a battle, 
or the march of a desolating plague. Montaigne, in 
his grave passages, reaches an eloquence intricate and 
highly wrought ; but then his moods are Protean, and 
he is constantly alternating his stateliness with fami- 
liarity, anecdote, humour, coarseness. His Essays are 
like a mythological landscape- — you hear the pipe of 
Pan in the distance, the naked goddess moves past, 
the satyr leers from the thicket. At the core of him 
profoundly melancholy, and consumed by a hunger 
for truth, he stands like Prospero in the enchanted 
island, and he has Ariel and Caliban to do his be- 
hests and run his errands. Sudden alternations are 
very characteristic of him. Whatever he says sug- 
gests its opposite. He laughs at himself and his 
reader. He builds his castle of cards for the mere 



36 On the Writing of Essays. 

pleasure of knocking it down again. He is ever un- 
expected and surprising. And with this curious 
mental activity, this play and linked dance of dis- 
cordant elements, his page is alive and restless, like 
the constant nicker of light and shadow in a mass of 
foliage which the wind is stirring. 

Montaigne is avowedly an egotist ; and by those 
who are inclined to make this a matter of reproach, 
it should be remembered that the value of egotism 
depends entirely on the egotist. If the egotist is 
weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is 
strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism 
is precious, and remains a possession of the race. If 
Shakspeare had left personal revelations, how we 
should value them ; if, indeed, he has not in some 
sense left them — if the tragedies and comedies are 
not personal revelations altogether — the multiform 
nature of the man rushing toward the sun at once in 
Falstaff, Hamlet, and Romeo. But calling Montaigne 
an egotist does not go a great way to decipher him. 
No writer takes the reader so much into his con- 
fidence, and no one so entirely escapes the penalty of 
confidence. He tells us everything about himself, we 
think; and when all is told, it is astonishing how little 
we really know. The esplanades of Montaigne's pa- 
lace are thoroughfares, men from every European 
country rub clothes there, but somewhere in the build- 
ing there is a secret room in which the master sits, of 
which no one but himself wears the key. We read in 



On the Writing of Essays. 37 

the Essays about his wife, his daughter, his daughter's 
governess, of his cook, of his page, " who was never 
found guilty of telling the truth," of his library, the 
Gascon harvest outside his chateau, his habits of com- 
position, his favourite speculations ; but somehow the 
man himself is constantly eluding us. His daughter's 
governess, his page, the ripening Gascon fields, are 
never introduced for their own sakes; they are em- 
ployed to illustrate and set off the subject on which 
he happens to be writing. A brawl in his own kitchen 
he does not consider worthy of being specially set 
down, but he has seen and heard everything; it comes 
in his way when travelling in some remote region, and 
accordingly it finds a place. He is the frankest, most 
outspoken of writers; and that very frankness and 
outspokenness puts the reader off his guard. If you 
wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness. 
The Essays are full of this trick. The frankness is as 
well simulated as the grape-branches of the Grecian 
artist which the birds flew towards and pecked. When 
Montaigne retreats, he does so like a skilful general, 
leaving his fires burning. In other ways, too, he is 
an adept in putting his reader out. He discourses 
with the utmost gravity, but you suspect mockery or 
banter in his tones. He is serious with the most 
trifling subjects, and he trifles with the most serious. 
" He broods eternally over his own thought," but 
who can tell what his thought may be for the nonce 1 
He is of all writers the most vagrant, surprising, and, 



38 On the Writing of Essays. 

to many minds, illogical. His sequences are not 
the sequences of other men. His writings are as 
full of transformations as a pantomime or a fairy tale. 
His arid wastes lead up to glittering palaces, his 
banqueting-halls end in a dog-hutch. He begins an 
essay about trivialities, and the conclusion is in the 
other world. And the peculiar character of his writing, 
like the peculiar character of all writing which is 
worth anything, arises from constitutional turn of 
mind. He is constantly playing at fast and loose with 
himself and his reader. He mocks and scorns his 
deeper nature ; and, like Shakspeare in Hamlet, says 
his deepest things in a jesting way. When he is 
gayest, be sure there is a serious design in his gaiety. 
Singularly shrewd and penetrating — sad, not only from 
sensibility of exquisite nerve and tissue, but from 
meditation, and an eye that pierced the surfaces of 
things — fond of pleasure, yet strangely fascinated by 
death — sceptical, yet clinging to what the Church 
taught and believed — lazily possessed by a high ideal 
of life, yet unable to reach it, careless perhaps often 
to strive after it, and with no very high opinion of his 
own goodness, or of the goodness of his fellows — 
and with all these serious elements, an element of 
humour mobile as flame, which assumed a variety of 
forms, now pure fun, now mischievous banter, now 
blistering scorn — humour in all its shapes, carelessly 
exercised on himself and his readers — with all this 
variety, complexity, riot, and contradiction almost of 



On the Writing of Essays. 39 

intellectual forces within, Montaigne wrote his be- 
wildering Essays — with the exception of Rabelais, the 
greatest modern Frenchman — the creator of a distinct 
literary form, and to whom, down even to our own 
day, even in point of subject-matter, every essayist 
has been more or less indebted. 

Bacon is the greatest of the serious and stately 
essayists, — Montaigne the greatest of the garrulous 
and communicative. The one gives you his thoughts 
on Death, Travel, Government, and the like, and lets 
you make the best of them; the other gives you his 
on the same subjects, but he wraps them up in per- 
sonal gossip and reminiscence. With the last it is 
never Death or Travel alone ; it is always Death one- 
fourth, and Montaigne three-fourths ; or Travel one- 
fourth, and Montaigne three-fourths. He pours his 
thought into the water of gossip, and gives you to 
drink. He gilds his pill always, and he always gilds 
it with himself. The general characteristics of his 
Essays have been indicated, and it is worth while in- 
quiring what they teach, what positive good they have 
done, and why for three centuries they have charmed, 
and still continue to charm. 

The Essays contain a philosophy of life, which is 
not specially high, yet which is certain to find accept- 
ance more or less with men who have passed out 
beyond the glow of youth, and who have made trial of 
the actual world. The essence of his philosophy is a 
kind of cynical common sense. He will risk nothing 



40 On the Writing of Essays. 

in life ; he will keep to the beaten track ; he will not let 
passion blind or enslave him; he will gather around 
him what good he can, and will therewith endeavour 
to be content. He will be, as far as possible, self- 
sustained ; he will not risk his happiness in the hands 
of man, or of woman either. He is shy of friendship, 
he fears love, for he knows that both are dangerous. 
He knows that life is full of bitters, and he holds it 
wisdom that a man should console himself, as far as 
possible, with its sweets, the principal of which are 
peace, travel, leisure, and the writing of essays. He 
values obtainable Gascon bread and cheese more than 
the unobtainable stars. He thinks crying for the moon 
the foolishest thing in the world. He will remain 
where he is. He will not deny that a new world 
may exist beyond the sunset, but he knows that to 
reach the new world there is a troublesome Atlantic 
to cross; and he is not in the least certain that, put- 
ting aside the chance of being drowned on the way, 
he will be one whit happier in the new world than he 
is in the old. For his part he will embark with no 
Columbus. He feels that life is but a sad thing at 
best; but as he has little hope of making it better, he 
accepts it, and will not make it worse by murmuring. 
When the chain galls him, he can at least revenge 
himself by making jests on it. He will temper the 
despotism of nature by epigrams. He has read ^Esop's 
fable, and is the last man in the world to relinquish the 
shabbiest substance to grasp at the finest shadow. 



On the Writing of Essays. 41 

Of nothing under the sun was Montaigne quite cer- 
tain, except that every man — whatever his station — 
might travel farther and fare worse; and that the 
playing with his own thoughts, in the shape of essay- 
writing, was the most harmless of amusements. His 
practical acquiescence in things does not promise 
much fruit, save to himself; yet in virtue of it he 
became one of the forces of the world — a very visible 
agent in bringing about the Europe which surrounds 
us to-day. He lived in the midst of the French 
religious wars. The rulers of his country were exe- 
crable Christians, but most orthodox Catholics. The 
burning of heretics was a public amusement, and the 
court ladies sat out the play. On the queen-mother 
and on her miserable son lay all the blood of the St 
Bartholomew. The country was torn asunder ; every- 
where was battle, murder, pillage, and such woful 
partings as Mr Millais has represented in his incom- 
parable picture. To the solitary humorous essayist 
this state of things was hateful. He was a good 
Catholic in his easy way ; he attended divine service 
regularly ; he crossed himself when he yawned. He 
conformed in practice to every rule of the Church ; 
but if orthodox in these matters, he was daring in 
speculation. There was nothing he was not bold 
enough to question. He waged war after his peculiar 
fashion with every form of superstition. He worked 
under the foundations of priestcraft. But while serv- 
ing the Reformed cause, he had no sympathy with 



42 On the Writing of Essays, 

Reformers. If they would but remain quiet, but keep 
their peculiar notions to themselves, France would 
rest ! That a man should go to the stake for an 
opinion, was as incomprehensible to him as that a 
priest or king should send him there for an opinion. 
He thought the persecuted and the persecutors fools 
about equally matched. He was easy -tempered and 
humane — in the hunting-field, he could not bear the 
cry of a dying hare with composure — martyr-burning 
had consequently no attraction for such a man. 
His scepticism came into play, his melancholy 
humour, his sense of the illimitable which surrounds 
man's life, and which mocks, defeats, flings back 
his thought upon himself. Man is here, he said, 
with bounded powers, with limited knowledge, with 
an unknown behind, an unknown in front, assured 
of nothing but that he was born, and that he must 
die ; why, then, in Heaven's name should he burn 
his fellow for a difference of opinion in the matter 
of surplices, or as to the proper fashion of conduct- 
ing devotion 1 Out of his scepticism and his merciful 
disposition grew, in that fiercely intolerant age, the 
idea of toleration, of which he was the apostle. 
Widely read, charming every one by his wit and 
wisdom, his influence spread from mind to mind, and 
assisted in bringing about the change which has taken 
place in European thought. His ideas, perhaps, did 
not spring from the highest sources. He was no 
ascetic, he loved pleasure, he was tolerant of every- 



On the Writing of Essays. 43 

thing except cruelty ; but on that account we should 
not grudge him his meed. It is in this indirect way 
that great writers take their place among the forces of 
the world. In the long run, genius and wit side with 
the right cause. And the man fighting against wrong 
to-day is assisted, in a greater degree than perhaps he 
is himself aware, by the sarcasm of this writer, the 
metaphor of that, the song of the other, although 
the writers themselves professed indifference, or were 
even counted as belonging to the enemy. 

Montaigne's hold on his readers arises from many 
causes. There is his frank and curious self-deline- 
ation ; that interests, because it is the revelation of 
a very peculiar nature. Then there is the positive 
value of separate thoughts imbedded in his strange 
whimsicality and humour. Lastly, there is the peren- 
nial charm of style, which is never a separate quality, 
but rather the amalgam and issue of all the mental and 
moral qualities in a man's possession, and which 
bears the same relation to these that light bears 
to the mingled elements that make up the orb of 
the sun. And style, after all, rather than thought, 
is the immortal, thing in literature. In literature, the 
charm of style is indefinable, yet all-subduing, just as 
fine manners are in social life. In reality, it is not of 
so much consequence what you say, as how you say 
it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account 
of some single irradiating word. " But Shadwell never 
deviates into sense, for instance." Young Roscius, in his 



44 On the Writing of Essays. 

provincial barn, will repeat you the great soliloquy of 
Hamlet, and although every word may be given with 
tolerable correctness, you find it just as commonplace 
as himself; the great actor speaks it, and you " read 
Shakspeare as by a flash of lightning." And it is in 
Montaigne's style, in the strange freaks and turnings 
of his thought, his constant surprises, his curious 
alternations of humour and melancholy, his careless, 
familiar form of address, and the grace with which 
everything is done, that his charm lies, and which 
makes the hundredth perusal of him as pleasant as 
the first. 

And on style depends the success of the essayist. 
Montaigne said the most familiar things in the finest 
fray. Goldsmith could not be termed a thinker ; but 
everything he touched he brightened, as after a month 
of dry weather, the shower brightens the dusty shrub- 
bery of a suburban villa. The world is not so much 
in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows 
old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, 
be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued 
fresh and new. Love is an old story enough, but in 
every generation it is re-born, in the downcast eyes 
and blushes of young maidens. And so, although he 
fluttered in Eden, Cupid is young to-day. If Mon- 
taigne had lived in Dreamthorp, as I am now living, 
had he written essays as I am now writing them, his 
English Essays would have been as good as his 
Gascon ones. Looking on, the country cart would 



On the Writing of Essays. 45 

not for nothing have passed him on the road to 
market, the setting sun would be arrested in its 
splendid colours, the idle chimes of the church would 
be translated into a thoughtful music. As it is, the 
village life goes on, and there is no result. My 
sentences are not much more brilliant than the 
speeches of the clowns ; in my book there is little 
more life than there is in the market-place on the days 
when there is no market. 



OF DEATH AND THE FEAR OF DYING. 

r ET me curiously analyse eternal farewells, and the 
last pressures of loving hands. Let me smile 
at faces bewept, and the nodding plumes and slow 
paces of funerals. Let me write down brave heroical 
sentences — sentences that defy death, as brazen 
Goliath the hosts of Israel. 

"When death waits for us is uncertain ; let us 
everywhere look for him. The premeditation of 
death is the premeditation of liberty ; who has learnt 
to die, has forgot to serve. There is nothing of evil 
in life for him who rightly comprehends that death is 
no evil ; to know how to die delivers us from all sub- 
jection and constraint. Paulus sEmilius answered 
him whom the miserable king of Macedon, his prisoner, 
sent to entreat him that he would not lead him in his 
triumph, ' Let him make that request to himself! In 
truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is 
very hard for art and industry to perform anything to 
purpose. I am, in my own nature, not melancholy, 
but thoughtful ; and there is nothing I have more 
continually entertained myself withal than the imagi- 



Death and Dying. 47 

nations of death, even in the gayest and most wanton 
time of my age. In the company of ladies, and in 
the height of mirth, some have perhaps thought me 
possessed of some jealousy, or meditating upon the 
uncertainty of some imagined hope, whilst I was en- 
tertaining myself with the remembrance of some one 
surprised a few days before with a burning fever, of 
which he died, returning from an entertainment like 
this, with his head full of idle fancies of love and 
jollity, as mine was then ; and for aught I knew, the 
same destiny was attending me. Yet did not this 
thought wrinkle my forehead any more than any 
other." .... "Why dost thou fear this last day 1 ? 
It contributes no more to thy destruction than every 
one of the rest. The last step is not the cause of 
lassitude, it does but confer it. Every day travels 
toward death ; the last only arrives at it. These are 
the good lessons our mother nature teaches. I have 
often considered with myself whence it should pro- 
ceed, that in war the image of death — whether we 
look upon it as to our own particular danger, or that 
of another — should, without comparison, appear less 
dreadful than at home in our own houses, (for if it 
were not so, it would be an army of whining milk- 
sops,) and that being still in all places the same, 
there should be, notwithstanding, much more assur- 
ance in peasants and the meaner sort of people, than 
others of better quality and education; and I do 
verily believe, that it is those terrible ceremonies and 



48 Death and Dying. 

preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify 
ns than the thing itself ; a new, quite contrary way of 
living, the cries of mothers, wives, and children, the 
visits of astonished and affected friends, the attend- 
ance of pale and blubbered servants, a dark room set 
round with burning tapers, our beds environed with 
physicians and divines ; in fine, nothing but ghostli- 
ness and horror round about us, render it so formid- 
able, that a man almost fancies himself dead and 
buried already. Children are afraid even of those 
they love best, and are best acquainted with, when 
disguised in a vizor, and so are we ; the vizor must 
be removed as well from things as persons ; which 
being taken away, we shall find nothing underneath 
but the very same death that a mean servant, or a 
poor chambermaid, died a day or two ago, without 
any manner of apprehension or concern."* 

" Men feare death as children feare to goe in the 
darke ; and as that natural feare in children is in- 
creased with tales, so in the other. Certainly the con- 
templation of death as the wages of sinne, and passage 
to another world, is holy and religious ; but the feare 
of it as a tribute due unto nature, is weake. Yet in 
religious meditations there is sometimes mixture of 
vanitie and of superstition. You shal reade in some 
of the friars' books of mortification, that a man should 
thinke unto himself what the paine is if he have but 
his finger-end pressed or tortured ; and thereby ima- 
* Montaigne. 



Death and Dying. 49 

gine what the paines of death are when the whole 
body is corrupted and dissolved ; when many times 
death passeth with lesse paine than the torture of a 
Lemme. For the most vitall parts are not the quickest 
of sense. Groanes and convulsions, and a discoloured 
face, and friends weeping, and blackes and obsequies, 
and the like, shew death terrible. It is worthy the 
observing, that there is no passion in the minde of 
man so weake but it mates and masters the feare of 
death; and therefore death is no such terrible enemy 
when a man hath so many attendants about him that 
can winne the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over 
death, love subjects it, honour aspire th to it, grief e 
fleeth to it, feare pre-occupieth it ; nay, we read, after 
Otho the emperour had slaine himselfe, fiitty, (which 
is the tenderest of affections,) provoked many to die, 
out of meer compassion to their soveraigne, and as the 
truest sort of followers. . . . . It is as naturall to die 
as to be borne ; and to a little infant, perhaps, the 
one is as painfull as the other. He that dies in an 
earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot 
blood, who for the time scarce feels the hurt ; and, 
therefore, a minde fixt and bent upon somewhat that 
is good, doth avert the sadness of death. But above 
all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is, Nunc Dimittis, 
when a man hath obtained worthy ends and expecta- 
tions. Death hath this also ; that it openeth the 
gate to good fame, and extinguished! envie."* 

* Bacon. 
D 



50 Death and Dying. 

These sentences of the great essayists are brave 
and ineffectual as Leonidas and his Greeks. Death 
cares very little for sarcasm or trope ; hurl at him a 
javelin or a rose, it is all one. We build around 
ourselves ramparts of stoical maxims, edifying to wit- 
ness, but when the terror comes these yield as the 
knots of river nags to the shoulder of Behemoth. 

Death is terrible only in presence. When distant, 
or supposed to be distant, we can call him hard or ten- 
der names, nay, even poke our poor fun at him. Mr 
Punch, on one occasion, when he wished to ridicule 
the useful-information leanings of a certain periodical 
publication, quoted from its pages the sentence, "Man 
is mortal," and people were found to grin broadly over 
the exquisite stroke of humour. Certainly the words, 
and the fact they contain, are trite enough. Utter 
the sentence gravely in any company, and you are 
certain to provoke laughter. And yet some subtle re- 
cognition of the fact of death runs constantly through 
the warp and woof of the most ordinary human exist- 
ence. And this recognition does not always terrify. 
The spectre has the most cunning disguises, and often 
when near us we are unaware of the fact of prox- 
imity. Unsuspected, this idea of death lurks in the 
sweetness of music ; it has something to do with the 
pleasure with which we behold the vapours of morn- 
ing; it comes between the passionate lips of lovers; it 
lives in the thrill of kisses. " An inch deeper, and 
you will find the emperor.' ; ' Probe joy to its last 



Death and Dying. 5 1 

fibre, and you will find death. And it is the most 
merciful of all the merciful provisions of nature, that 
a haunting sense of insecurity should deepen the en- 
joyment of what we have secured ; that the pleasure 
of our warm human day and its activities should to 
some extent arise from a vague consciousness of the 
waste night which environs it, in which no arm is 
raised, in which no voice is ever heard. Death is 
the ugly fact which nature has to hide, and she 
hides it well. Human life were otherwise an im- 
possibility. The pantomime runs on merrily enough; 
bat when once Harlequin lifts his vizor, Columbine 
disappears, the jest is frozen on the Clown's lips, 
and the hand of the filching Pantaloon is arrested 
in the act. Wherever death looks, there is silence 
and trembling. But although on every man he will 
one day or another look, he is coy of revealing 
himself till the appointed time. He makes his ap- 
proaches like an Indian warrior, under covers and 
ambushes. We have our parts to play, and he re- 
mains hooded till they are played out. We are agitated 
by our passions, we busily pursue our ambitions, we 
are acquiring money or reputation, and all at once, in 
the centre of our desires, we discover the " Shadow 
feared of man." And so nature fools the poor human 
mortal evermore. When she means to be deadly, she 
dresses her face in smiles ; when she selects a victim, 
she sends him a poisoned rose. There is no pleasure, 
no shape of good fortune, no form of glory in which 



5 2 Death and Dying. 

death has not hid himself, and waited silently for his 
prey. 

And death is the most ordinary thing in the world. 
It is as common as births ; it is of more frequent oc- 
currence than marriages and the attainment of majo- 
rities. But the difference between death and other 
forms of human experience lies in this, that we can 
gain no information about it. The dead man is wise, 
but he is silent. We cannot wring his secret from 
him. We cannot interpret the ineffable calm which 
gathers on the rigid face. As a consequence, when 
our thought rests on death we are smitten with isola- 
tion and loneliness. We are without company on the 
dark road ; and we have advanced so far upon it that 
we cannot hear the voices of our friends. It is in 
this sense of loneliness, this consciousness of identity 
and nothing more, that the terror of dying consists. 
And yet, compared to that road, the most populous 
thoroughfare of London or Pekin is a desert. What 
enumerator will take for us the census of the dead ? 
And this matter of death and dying, like most things 
else in the world, may be exaggerated by our own 
fears and hopes. Death, terrible to look forward to, 
may be pleasant even to look back at. Could we be 
admitted to the happy fields, and hear the conversations 
which blessed spirits hold, one might discover that to 
conquer death a man has but to die ; that by that act 
terror is softened into familiarity, and that the remem- 
brance of death becomes but as the remembrance of 



Death and Dying. 53 

yesterday.^ To these fortunate ones death may be 
but a date, and dying a subject fruitful in com- 
parisons, a matter on which experiences may be 
serenely compared. Meantime, however, we have 
not yet reached that measureless content, and death 
scares, piques, tantalises, as mind and nerve are built. 
Situated as we are, knowing that it is inevitable, we 
cannot keep our thoughts from resting on it curiously, 
at times. Nothing interests us so much. The High- 
land seer pretended that he could see the winding- 
sheet high upon the breast of the man for whom death 
was waiting. Could we behold any such visible sign, 
the man who bore it, no matter where he stood — even 
if he were a slave watching Caesar pass — would usurp 
every eye. At the coronation of a king, the wearing of 
that order would dim royal robe, quench the sparkle 
of the diadem, and turn to vanity the herald's cry. 
Death makes the meanest beggar august, and that 
augustness would assert itself in the presence of a 
king. And it is this curiosity with regard to every- 
thing related to death and dying which makes us trea- 
sure up the last sayings of great men, and attempt to 
wring out of them tangible meanings. Was Goethe's 
" Light — light, more light !" a prayer, or a statement of 
spiritual experience, or simply an utterance of the fact 
that the room in which he lay was filling with the last 
twilight % In consonance with our own natures we in- 
terpret it the one way or the other — he is beyond our 
questioning. For the same reason it is that men take 



54 'Death ct7td Dying. 

interest in executions — from Charles I. on the scaf- 
fold at Whitehall, to Porte ous in the Grassmarket exe- 
crated by the mob. These men are not dulled by 
disease, they are not delirious with fever; they look 
death in the face, and what in these circumstances 
they say and do has the strangest fascination for us. 

What does the murderer think when his eyes are 
for ever blinded by the accursed nightcap % In what 
form did thought condense itself between the gleam 
of the lifted axe and the rolling of King Charles's 
head in the saw-dust 1 This kind of speculation may 
be morbid, but it is not necessarily so. All extremes 
of human experience touch us j and we have all the 
deepest personal interest in the experience of death. 
Out of all we know about dying we strive to clutch 
something which may break its solitariness, and re- 
lieve us by a touch of companionship. 

To denude death of its terrible associations were a 
vain attempt. The atmosphere is always cold around 
an iceberg. In the contemplation of dying the spirit 
may not flinch, but pulse and heart, colour and 
articulation, are always cowards. No philosophy 
will teach them bravery in the stern presence. And 
yet there are considerations which rob death of 
its ghastliness, and help to reconcile us to it. The 
thoughtful happiness of a human being is complex, 
and in certain moved moments, which, after they have 
gone, we can recognise to have been our happiest 
some subtle thought of death has been curiously in 






Death and Dying. . 5 5 

termixed. And this subtle intermixture it is which 
gives the happy moment its character — which makes 
the difference between the gladness of a child, resi- 
dent in mere animal health and impulse, and too 
volatile to be remembered, and the serious joy of a 
man, which looks before and after, and takes in both 
this world and the next. Speaking broadly, it may 
be said that it is from some obscure recognition of 
the fact of death that life draws its final sweetness. 
An obscure, haunting recognition, of course; for if 
more than that, if the thought becomes palpable, 
defined, and present, it swallows up everything. The 
howling of the winter wind outside increases the warm 
satisfaction of a man in bed ; but this satisfaction is 
succeeded by quite another feeling when the wind 
grows into a tempest, and threatens to blow the house 
down. And this remote recognition of death may 
exist almost constantly in a man's mind, and give to 
his life keener zest and relish. His lights may burn 
the brighter for it, and his wines taste sweeter. For 
it is on the tapestry of a dim ground that the figures 
come out in the boldest relief and the brightest colour. 
If we were to live here always, with no other care 
than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life 
would be a very sorry business. It is immeasurably 
heightened by the solemnity of death. The bmtes 
die even as we ; but it is our knowledge that we have 
to die which makes us human. If nature cunningly 
hides death, and so permits us to play out our little 



56 Death and Dying. 

games, it is easily seen that our knowing it to be in- 
evitable, that to every one of us it will come one day 
or another, is a wonderful spur to action. We really do 
work while it is called to-day, because the night cometh 
when no man can work. We may not expect it soon 
— it may not have sent us a single avant-courier — yet 
we all know that every day brings it nearer. On the 
supposition that we were to live here always, there 
would be little inducement to exertion. But, having 
some work at heart, the knowledge that we may be, 
any day, finally interrupted, is an incentive to dili- 
gence. We naturally desire to have it completed, or 
at least far advanced toward completion, before that 
final interruption takes place. And knowing that 
his existence here is limited, a man's workings have 
reference to others rather than to himself, and thereby 
into his nature comes a new influx of nobility. If a 
man plants a tree, he knows that other hands than his 
will gather the fruit ; and when he plants it, he thinks 
quite as much of those other hands as of his own. 
Thus to the poet there is the dearer life after life ; and 
posterity's single laurel leaf is valued more than a multi- 
tude of contemporary bays. Even the man immersed 
in money-making does not make money so much for 
himself as for those who may come after him. Riches 
in noble natures have a double sweetness. The pos- 
sessor enjoys his wealth, and he heightens that enjoy- 
ment by an imaginative entrance into the pleasure 
which his son or his nephew may derive from it when 



Death and Dying. 5 7 

he is away, or the high uses to which he may turn it. 
Seeing that we have no perpetual lease of life and its 
adjuncts, we do not live for ourselves. And thus it 
is that death, which we are accustomed to consider an 
evil, really acts for us the friendliest part, and takes 
away the commonplace of existence. My life, and 
your life, flowing on thus day by day, is a vapid enough 
piece of business ; but when we think that it must 
close, a multitude of considerations, not connected with 
ourselves, but with others, rush in, and vapidity vanishes 
at once. Life, if it were to flow on for ever and thus, 
would stagnate and rot. The hopes, and fears, and 
regrets, which move and trouble it, keep it fresh and 
healthy, as the sea is kept alive by the trouble of its 
tides. In a tolerably comfortable world, where death 
is not, it is difficult to see from what quarter these 
healthful fears, regrets, and hopes could come. As 
it is, there are agitations and sufferings in our lots 
enough ; but we must remember that it is on account 
of these sufferings and agitations that we become 
creatures breathing thoughtful breath. As has already 
been said, death takes away the commonplace of life., 
And positively, when one looks on the thousand 
and one poor, foolish, ignoble faces of this world, 
and listens to the chatter as poor and foolish as 
the faces, one, in order to have any proper respect 
for them, is forced to remember that solemnity 
of death, which is silently waiting. The foolishest 
person will look grand enough one day. The features 



58 Death and Dying. 

are poor now, but the hottest tears and the most 
passionate embraces will not seem out of place then. 
If you wish to make a man look noble, your best 
course is to kill him. What superiority he may have 
inherited from his race, what superiority nature may 
have personally gifted him with, comes out in death. 
The passions which agitate, distort, and change, are 
gone away for ever, and the features settle back into 
a marble calm, which is the man's truest image. Then 
the most affected look sincere, the most volatile seri- 
ous — all noble, more or less. And nature will not be 
surprised into disclosures. The man stretched out 
there may have been voluble as a swallow, but now — 
when he could speak to some purpose — neither pyra- 
mid nor sphynx holds a secret more tenaciously. 

Consider, then, how the sense of impermanence 
brightens beauty and elevates happiness. Melan- 
choly is always attendant on beauty, and that melan- 
choly brings out its keenness as the dark -green cor- 
rugated leaf brings out the wan loveliness of the 
primrose. The spectator enjoys the beauty, but his 
knowledge that it is fleeting, and that he is fleeting, 
adds a pathetic something to it ; and by that some- 
thing the beautiful object and the gazer are alike 
raised. 

Everything is sweetened by risk. The pleasant 
emotion is mixed and deepened by a sense of mortality. 
Those lovers who have never encountered the pos- 
sibility of last embraces and farewells are novices in 



Death and Dying. 59 

the passion. Sunset affects us more powerfully than 
sunrise, simply because it is a setting sun, and suggests 
a thousand analogies. A mother is never happier 
than when her eyes fill over her sleeping child, never 
does she kiss it more fondly, never does she pray for 
it more fervently ; and yet there is more in her heart 
than visible red cheek and yellow curl; possession 
and bereavement are strangely mingled in the exqui- 
site maternal mood, the one heightening the other. 
All great joys are serious; and emotion must be 
measured by its complexity and the deepness of its 
reach. A musician may draw pretty notes enough 
from a single key, but the richest music is that in 
which the whole force of the instrument is employed, 
in the production of which every key is vibrating; 
and, although full of solemn touches and majestic 
tones, the final effect may be exuberant and gay. 
Pleasures which rise beyond the mere gratification of 
the senses are dependant for their exquisiteness on the 
number and variety of the thoughts which they evoke. 
And that joy is the greatest which, while felt to be 
joy, can include the thought of death and clothe itself 
with that crowning pathos. And in the minds of 
thoughtful persons every joy does, more or less, with 
that crowning pathos clothe itself. 

In life there is nothing more unexpected and sur- 
prising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. 
If we find it in one place to-day, it is vain to seek it 
there to-morrow. You cannot lay a trap for it. It 



60 Death and Dying. 

will fall into no ambuscade, concert it ever so cun- 
ningly. Pleasure has no logic ; it never treads in its 
own footsteps. Into our commonplace existence it 
comes with a surprise, like a pure white swan from 
the airy void into the ordinary village lake ; and just 
as the swan, for no reason that can be discovered, lifts 
itself on its wings and betakes itself to the void again, 
it leaves us, and our sole possession is its memory. 
And it is characteristic of pleasure that we can never 
recognise it to be pleasure till after it is gone. Hap- 
piness never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt 
to steal a glimpse of its features it disappears. It is a 
gleam of unreckoned gold. From the nature of the 
case, our happiness, such as in its degree it has been, 
lives in memory. We have not the voice itself; we 
have only its echo. We are never happy ; we can 
only remember that we were so once. And while in 
the very heart and structure of the happy moment 
there lurked an obscure consciousness of death, the 
memory in which past happiness dwells is always 
a regretful memory. This is why the tritest utter- 
ance about the past, youth, early love, and the 
like, has always about it an indefinable flavour 
of poetry, which pleases and affects. In the wake 
of a ship there is always a melancholy splendour. 
The finest set of verses of our modern time de- 
scribes how the poet gazed on the "happy autumn 
fields," and remembered the "days that were no 
more." After all, a man's real possession is his 



Death and Dying. 6 1 

memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else 
is he poor. 

In our warm imaginative youth, death is far re- 
moved from us, and attains thereby a certain pic- 
turesqueness. The grim thought stands in the ideal 
world as a ruin stands in a blooming landscape. 
The thought of death sheds a pathetic charm over 
everything then. The young man cools himself with 
a thought of the winding-sheet and the charnel, as the 
heated dancer cools himself on the balcony with the 
night-air. The young imagination plays with the 
idea of death, makes a toy of it, just as a child 
plays with edge-tools till once it cuts its fingers. The 
most lugubrious poetry is written by very young and 
tolerably comfortable persons. When a man's mood 
becomes really serious he has little taste for such 
foolery. The man who has a grave or two in his 
heart, does not need to haunt churchyards. The 
young poet uses death as an antithesis ; and when he 
shocks his reader by some flippant use of it in that 
way, he considers he has written something mightily 
fine. In his gloomiest mood he is most insincere, 
most egotistical, most pretentious. The older and 
wiser poet avoids the subject as he does the memory 
of pain ; or when he does refer to it, he does so in a 
reverential manner, and with some sense of its solem- 
nity and of the magnitude of its issues. It was in 
that year of revelry, 1814, and while undressing from 
balls, that Lord Byron wrote his " Lara," as he informs 



62 Death and Dying. 

us. Disrobing, and haunted, in all probability, by 
eyes in whose light he was happy enough, the spoiled 
young man, who then affected death-pallors, and 
wished the world to believe that he felt his richest 
wines powdered with the dust of graves, — of which 
wine, notwithstanding, he frequently took more than 
was good for him, — wrote, 

"That sleep the loveliest, since it dreams the least." 

The sleep referred to being death. This was meant 
to take away the reader's breath j and after per- 
forming the feat, Byron* betook himself to his pillow 
with a sense of supreme cleverness. Contrast with 
this Shakspeare's far out-looking and thought-heavy 
lines — lines which, under the same image, represent 
death — 

" To die — to sleep ; — 

To sleep ! perchance to dream ; — ay, there 's the rub ; 

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come ! " 

And you see at once how a man's notions of death 
and dying are deepened by a wider experience. 
Middle age may fear death quite as little as youth 
fears it ; but it has learned seriousness, and it has no 
heart to poke fun at the lean ribs, or to call it fond 
names like a lover, or to stick a primrose in its grin- 
ning chaps, and draw a strange pleasure from the irre- 
levancy. 

The man who has reached thirty, feels at times as 
if he had come out of a great battle. Comrade after 



Death and Dying. 63 

comrade has fallen ; his own life seems to have been 
charmed. And knowing how it fared with his friends 
— perfect health one day, a catarrh the next, blinds 
drawn down, silence in the house, blubbered faces of 
widow and orphans, intimation of the event in the 
newspapers, with a request that friends will accept of 
it, the day after — a man, as he draws near middle 
age, begins to suspect every transient indisposition ; 
to be careful of being caught in a shower, to shudder 
at sitting in wet shoes; he feels his pulse, he anxiously 
peruses his face in a mirror, he becomes critical as to 
the colour of his tongue. In early life illness is a 
luxury, and draws out toward the sufferer curious and 
delicious tendernesses, which are felt to be a full 
over-payment of pain and weakness ; then there is the 
pleasant period of convalescence, when one tastes a 
core and marrow of delight in meats, drinks, sleep, 
silence ; the bunch of newly-plucked flowers on the 
table, the sedulous attentions and patient forbearance 
of nurses and friends. Later in life, when one occu- 
pies a post, and is in discharge of duties which are 
accumulating against recovery, illness and convales- 
cence cease to be luxuries. Illness is felt to be 
a cruel interruption of the ordinary course of things, 
and the sick person is harassed by a sense of the 
loss of time and the loss of strength. He is placed 
mors de combat; all the while he is conscious that the 
battle is going on around him, and he feels his tem- 
porary withdrawal a misfortune. Of course, unless a 



64 Death and Dying. 

man is very unhappily circumstanced, he has in his 
later illnesses all the love, patience, and attention 
which sweetened his earlier ones ; but then he cannot 
rest in them, and accept them as before as compen- 
sation in full. The world is ever with him ; through 
his interests and his affections he has meshed himself 
in an intricate net-work of relationships and other 
dependences, and a fatal issue — which in such cases 
is ever on the cards — would destroy all these, and 
bring about more serious matters than the shedding 
of tears. In a man's earlier illnesses, too, he had not 
only no such definite future to work out, he had a 
stronger spring of life and hope ; he was rich in time, 
and could wait; and lying in his chamber now, he 
cannot help remembering that, as Mr Thackeray 
expresses it, there comes at last an illness to which 
there may be no convalescence. What if that illness 
be already come 1 And so there is nothing left for 
him, but to bear the rod with patience, and to exer- 
cise a humble faith in the Ruler of all. If he recovers, 
some half-dozen people will be made happy; if he 
does not recover, the same number of people will be 
made miserable for a little while, and, during the next 
two or three days, acquaintances will meet in the 
street — "You've heard of poor So-and-so? Very 
sudden ! Who would have thought it 1 Expect to 

meet you at 's on Thursday. Good-bye." And 

so the end. Your death and my death are mainly of 
importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be 



Death and Dying. 65 

stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, 
hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with 
the church-yard, and although we are away, the world 
wags on. It does not miss us ; and those who are 
near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears 
off, will not miss us much either. 

We are curious as to death-beds and death-bed 
sayings ; we wish to know how the matter stands ; 
how the whole thing looks to the dying. Unhappily 
— perhaps, on the whole, happily — we can gather no 
information from these. The dying are nearly as 
reticent as the dead. The inferences we draw from 
the circumstances of death, the pallor, the sob, the 
glazing eye, are just as likely to mislead us as not. 
Manfred exclaims, " Old man, 'tis not so difficult to 
die ! " Sterling wrote Carlyle " that it was all very 
strange, yet not so strange as it seemed to the lookers 
on." And so, perhaps, on the whole it is. The world 
has lasted six thousand years now, and, with the 
exception of those at present alive, the millions who 
have breathed upon it — splendid emperors, horny- 
fisted clowns, little children, in whom thought has 
never stirred — have died, and what they have done, 
we also shall be able to do. It may not be so 
difficult, may not be so terrible, as our fears whisper. 
The dead keep their secrets, and in a little while we 
shall be as wise as they — and as taciturn. 



WILLIAM DUNBAR. 

TF it be assumed that the North Briton is, to an 
appreciable extent, a different creature from the 
Englishman, the assumption is not likely to provoke 
dispute. No one will deny us the prominence of 
our cheek-bones, and our pride in the same. How- 
far the difference extends, whether it involves merit 
or demerit, are questions not now sought to be 
settled. Nor is it important to discover how the 
difference arose \ how far chiller climate and sourer 
soil, centuries of unequal yet not inglorious conflict, 
a separate race of kings, a body of separate traditions, 
and a peculiar crisis of reformation issuing in peculiar 
forms of religious worship, confirmed and strengthened 
the national idiosyncracy. If a difference between 
the races be allowed, it is sufficient for the present 
purpose. That allowed, and Scot and Southern being 
fecund in literary genius, it becomes an interesting 
inquiry to what extent the great literary men of the 
one race have influenced the great literary men of 
the other. On the whole, perhaps, the two races 
may fairly cry quits. Not unfrequently, indeed, have 



Dunbar. 67 

literary influences arisen in the north and travelled 
southwards. There were the Scottish ballads, for 
instance, there was Burns, there was Sir Walter Scott, 
there is Mr Carlyle. The literary influence repre- 
sented by each of these arose in Scotland, and has 
either passed or is passing " in music out of sight " 
in England. The energy of the northern wave has 
rolled into the southern waters. On the other hand, 
we can mark the literary influences travelling from 
the south northward. The English Chaucer rises, 
and the current of his influence is long afterwards 
visible in the Scottish King James, and the Scottish 
poet Dunbar. That which was Prior and Gay in 
London, became Allan Ramsay when it reached 
Edinburgh. Inspiration, not unfrequently, has tra- 
velled, like summer, from the south northwards ; just 
as, when the day is over, and the lamps are lighted 
in London, the radiance of the setting sun is lingering 
on the splintered peaks and rosy friths of the Hebrides. 
All this, however, is a matter of the past; literary 
influence can no longer be expected to travel leisurely 
from south to north, or from north to south. In 
times of literary activity, as at the beginning of the 
present century, the atmosphere of passion or specu- 
lation envelops the entire island, and Scottish and 
English writers simultaneously draw from it what 
their peculiar natures prompt — just as in the same 
garden the rose drinks crimson and the convolvulus 
azure from the superincumbent air. 



68 Dunbar. 

Chaucer must always remain a name in British 
literary history. He appeared at a time when the 
Saxon and Norman races had become fused, and 
when ancient bitternesses were lost in the proud title 
of Englishman. He was the first great poet the 
island produced ; and he wrote for the most part in 
the language of the people, with just the slightest in- 
fusion of the courtlier Norman element, which gives 
to his writings something of the high-bred air that 
the short upper-lip gives to the human countenance. 
In his earlier poems he was under the influence of the 
Provencal Troubadours, and in his " Flower and the 
Leaf," and other works of a similar class, he riots in 
allegory; he represents the cardinal virtues walking 
about in human shape ; his forests are full of beauti- 
ful ladies with coronals on their heads ; courts of love 
are held beneath the spreading elm, and metaphysical 
goldfinches and nightingales, perched among the 
branches green, wrangle melodiously about the tender 
passion. In these poems he is fresh, charming, 
fanciful as the spring-time itself: ever picturesque, 
ever musical, and with a homely touch and stroke of 
irony here and there, suggesting a depth of serious 
matter in him which it needed years only to develop. 
He lived in a brilliant and stirring time ; he was con- 
nected with the court ; he served in armies ; he 
visited the Continent ; and, although a silent man, he 
carried with him, wherever he went, and into what- 
ever company he was thrown, the most observant 



Dunbar. 69 

eyes perhaps that ever looked curiously out upon 
the world. There was nothing too mean or too trivial 
for his regard. After parting with a man, one fancies 
that he knew every line and wrinkle of his face, 
had marked the travel-stains on his boots, and had 
counted the slashes on his doublet. And so it was 
that, after mixing in kings' courts, and sitting with 
friars in taverns, and talking with people on country 
roads, and travelling in France and Italy, and making 
himself master of the literature, science, and theology 
of his time, and when perhaps touched with mis- 
fortune and sorrow, he came to see the depth of 
interest that resides in actual life, — that the rudest 
clown even, with his sordid humours and coarse 
speech, is intrinsically more valuable than a whole 
forest full of goddesses, or innumerable processions 
of cardinal virtues, however well mounted and splen- 
didly attired. It was in some such mood of mind 
that Chaucer penned those unparalleled pictures of 
contemporary life that delight yet, after five cen- 
turies have come and gone. It is difficult to define 
Chaucer's charm. He does not indulge in fine senti- 
ment ; he has no bravura passages ; he is ever master 
of himself and of his subject. The light upon his 
page is the light of common day. Although powerful 
delineations of passion may be found in his " Tales," 
and wonderful descriptions of nature, and although 
certain of the passages relating to Constance and 
Griselda in their deep distresses are unrivalled in 



jo Dunbar, 

tenderness, neither passion, nor natural description, 
nor pathos, are his striking characteristics. It is his 
shrewdness, his conciseness, his ever-present humour, 
his frequent irony, and his short, homely line — effec- 
tive as the play of the short Roman sword — which 
strikes the reader most. In the "Prologue to the 
Canterbury Tales" — by far the ripest thing he has 
done — he seems to be writing the easiest, most idio- 
matic prose, but it is poetry all the while. He is a 
poet of natural manner, dealing with out-door life. 
Perhaps, on the whole, the writer who most resembles 
him — superficial differences apart — is Fielding. In 
both there is constant shrewdness and common 
sense, a constant feeling of the comic side of things, 
a moral instinct which escapes in irony, never in 
denunciation or fanaticism ; no remarkable spiritu- 
ality of feeling, an acceptance of the world as a 
pleasant enough place, provided good dinners and 
a sufficiency of cash are to be had, and that healthy 
relish for fact and reality, and scorn of humbug 
of all kinds, especially of that particular phase of 
it which makes one appear better than one is, which 
— for want of a better term — we are accustomed 
to call English. Chaucer was a Conservative in all 
his feelings ; he liked to poke his fun at the clergy, 
but he was not of the stuff of which martyrs are 
made. He loved good eating and drinking, and 
studious leisure and peace ; and although in his ordi- 
nary moods shrewd, and observant, and satirical, 



Dunbar. 7 1 

his higher genius would now and then splendidly 
assert itself — and behold the tournament at Athens, 
where kings are combatants and Emily the prize ; or 
the little boat, containing the brain-bewildered Con- 
stance and her child, wandering hither and thither on 
the friendly sea. 

Chaucer was born about 1328, and died about 
1380 ; and although he had, both in Scotland and 
England, contemporaries and immediate successors, 
no one of them can be compared with him for a 
moment. The "Moral Gower" was his friend, and 
inherited his tediousness and pedantry without a 
sparkle of his fancy, passion, humour, wisdom, and 
good spirits. Occleve and Lydgate followed in the 
next generation; and although their names are re- 
tained in literary histories, no line or sentence of 
theirs has found a place in human memory. The 
Scottish contemporary of Chaucer was Barbour, who, 
although deficient in tenderness and imagination, de- 
serves praise for his sinewy and occasionally pictur- 
esque verse. "The Bruce" is really a fine poem. 
The hero is noble, resolute, and wise. Sir James 
Douglas is a very perfect, gentle knight. The old 
Churchman had the true poetic fire in him. He 
rises into eloquence in an apostrophe to Freedom, 
and he fights the battle of Bannockburn over again 
with great valour, shouting, and flapping of standards. 
In England, nature seemed to have exhausted herself 
in Chaucer, and she lay quiescent till Lord Surrey and 



72 Dunbar. 

Sir Thomas Wyatt came, the immediate precursors of 
Spenser, Shakspeare, and their companions. 

While in England the note of the nightingale sud- 
denly ceased, to be succeeded by the mere chirping of 
barn-door sparrows, the divine and melancholy voice 
began to be heard further north. It was during that 
most barren period of English poetry — extending 
from Chaucer's death till the beginning of Elizabeth's 
reign — that Scottish poetry arose, suddenly, splendidly 
— to be matched only by that other uprising nearer 
our own time, equally unexpected and splendid, of 
Burns and Scott. And it is curious to notice in this 
brilliant outburst of northern genius how much is 
owing to Chaucer ; the cast of language is identical, 
the literary form is the same, there is the same way of 
looking at nature, the same allegorical forests, the 
troops of ladies, the same processions of cardinal 
virtues. James L, whose long captivity in England 
made him acquainted with Chaucer's works, was the 
leader of the poetic movement which culminated in 
Dunbar, and died away in Sir David Lindsay just be- 
fore the noise and turmoil of the Reformation set in. 
In the concluding stanza of the " Quair," James re- 
cords his obligation to those — 

"Masters dear, 
Gower and Chaucer, that on the steppes sate 

Of retorick, while they were livand here, 
Superlative as poets laureate 
Of morality and eloquence ornate." 



Dunbar. 73 

But while, during the reigns of the Jameses, Scottish 
genius was being acted upon by the broader and 
deeper genius of England, Scotland, quite uncon- 
sciously to herself, was preparing a liquidation in full 
of all spiritual obligations. For even then, in obscure 
nooks and corners, the Scottish ballads were growing 
up, quite uncontrolled by critical rules, rude in struc- 
ture and expression, yet, at the same time, full of 
vitality, retaining in all their keenness the mirth of 
rustic festivals, and the piteousness of domestic 
tragedies. The stormy feudal time out of which 
they arose crumbled by process of gradual decay, 
but they remained, made brighter by each succeeding 
summer, like the wild-flowers that blow in the clunks 
of ruins. And when English poetry had become arti- 
ficial and cold, the lucubrations of forgotten Scottish 
minstrels, full of the touches that make the whole 
world kin, brought new life with them. Scotland 
had invaded' England more than once, but the blue 
bonnets never went over the border so triumphantly 
as when they did so in the shape of songs and ballads. 
James IV., if not the wisest, was certainly the most 
brilliant monarch of his name ; and he was fortunate 
beyond the later Stuarts in this, that during his life- 
time no new popular tide had set in which it behoved 
him to oppose or to float upon. For him in all its 
essentials to-day had flowed quietly out of yesterday, 
and he lived unperplexed by fear of change. With 
something of a Southern gaiety of spirit, he was a 



74 Dunbar. 

merrier monarch than his dark-featured and saturnine 
descendant who bore the appellation. He was fond 
of martial sports, he loved to glitter at tournaments, 
his court was crowded with singing men and sing- 
ing women. Yet he had his gloomy moods and 
superstitious despondencies. He could not forget 
that he had appeared in arms against his father ; even 
while he whispered in the ear of beauty the iron belt 
of penance was fretting his side, and he alternated 
the splendid revel with the cell of the monk. In 
these days, and for long after, the Borders were dis- 
turbed, and the Highland clans, setting royal authority 
at defiance, were throttling each other in their mists. 
The Catholic religion was yet unsapped, and the wealth 
of the country resided in the hands of the nobles 
and the churchmen. Edinburgh towered high on 
the ridge between Holyrood and the Castle, its streets 
reddened with feud at intervals, and its merchants 
clustering round the Cathedral of St Giles like bees 
in a honeycomb ; and the king, when he looked 
across the faint azure of the Forth, beheld the long 
coast of Fife dotted with little towns, where ships were 
moored that traded with France and Holland, and 
brought with them cargoes of silks and wines. James 
was a popular monarch ; he was beloved by the 
nobles and by the people. He loved justice, he 
cultivated his marine, and he built the Great Michael 
— the Great Eastern of that day. He had valiant 
seamen, and more than once Barton sailed into Leith 



Dunbar. 75 

with a string of English prizes. When he fell with all 
his nobility at Flodden, there came upon Scotland 
the woe with which she was so familiar — 

" Woe to that realme that haith an ower young king." 

A long regency followed ; disturbing elements of re- 
ligion entered into the life of the nation, and the his- 
torical stream which had flowed smoothly for a series 
of years became all at once convulsed and turbulent, 
as if it had entered upon a gorge of rapids. It was in 
this pleasant interregnum of the reign of the fourth 
James, when ancient disorders had to a certain extent 
been repressed, and when religious difficulties ahead 
were yet undreamed of, that the poet Dunbar flour- 
ished — a nightingale singing in a sunny lull of the 
Scottish historical storm. 

Modern readers are acquainted with Dunbar chiefly 
through the medium of Mr David Laing's beautiful 
edition of his works published in 1834, and by good 
Dr Irving's intelligent and admirable compacted 
" History of Scottish Poetry," published the other 
day. Irving's work, if deficient somewhat in fluency 
and grace of style, is characterised by conscientious- 
ness of statement and by the ripest knowledge. Yet, 
despite the researches of these competent writers, of 
the events of the poet's life not much is known. He 
was born about 1460, and from an unquotable allu- 
sion in one of his poems, he is supposed to have been 
a native of the Lothians. His name occurs in the 



J 6 Dunbar. 

register of the University of St Andrews as a Bachelor 
of Arts. With the exception of these entries in the 
college register, there is nothing authentically known 
of his early life. We have no portrait of him, and 
cannot by that means decipher him. We do not know 
with certainty from what family he sprang. Beyond 
what light his poems may throw on them, we have 
no knowledge of his habits and personal tastes. He 
exists for the most part in rumour, and the vague 
shadows of things. It appears that in early life he 
became a friar of the order of St Francis ; and in 
the capacity of a travelling priest he tells us that "he 
preached in Derntown kirk and in Canterbury ;" that 
he " passed at Dover across the Channel, and went 
through Picardy teaching the people." He does not 
seem to have taken kindly to his profession. His 
works are full of sarcastic allusions to the clergy, and 
in no measured terms he denounces their luxury, their 
worldly-mindedness, and their desire for high place 
and fat livings. Yet these denunciations have no 
very spiritual origin. His rage is the rage of a dis- 
appointed candidate, rather than of a prophet ; and, 
to the last, he seems to have expected preferment in 
the Church. Not without a certain pathos he writes, 
when he had become familiar with disappointment, 
and the sickness of hope deferred — 
" I wes in youth an nurciss knee, 
Dandely ! bischop, dandely ! 
And quhen that age now dois me greif, 
Ane sempill vicar I can nocht be." 



Dunbar. yj 

It is not known when he entered the service of 
King James. From his poems it appears that he was 
employed as a clerk or secretary in several of the mis- 
sions despatched to foreign courts. It is difficult to 
guess in what capacity Dunbar served at Holyrood. 
He was all his life a priest, and expected preferment 
from his royal patron. We know that he performed 
mass in the presence. Yet when the king in one of 
his dark moods had withdrawn from the gaieties of the 
capital to the religious gloom of the convent of Fran- 
ciscans at Stirling, we find the poet inditing a parody 
on the machinery of the Church, calling on Father, 
Son, and Holy Spirit, and on all the saints of the cal- 
endar, to transport the princely penitent from Stirling, 
" where ale is thin and small," to Edinburgh, where 
there is abundance of swans, cranes, and plovers, and 
the fragrant clarets of France. And in another of his 
poems, he describes himself as dancing in the Queen's 
chamber so zealously that he lost one of his slippers, 
a mishap which provoked her Majesty to great mirth. 
Probably, as the king was possessed of considerable 
literary taste, and could appreciate Dunbar's fancy 
and satire, he kept him attached to his person, with 
the intention of conferring a benefice on him when 
one fell vacant ; and when a benefice did fall vacant, 
felt compelled to bestow it on the cadet of some 
powerful family in the state, — for it was always the 
policy of James to stand well with his nobles. He 
remembered too well the deaths of his father and 



78 Dunbar. 

great-grandfather to give unnecessary offence to his 
great barons. From his connexion with the court, 
the poet's life may be briefly epitomised. In August 
1500, his royal master granted Dunbar an annual 
pension of £10 for life, or till such time as he should 
be promoted to a benefice of the annual value of £40. 
In 1 501, he visited England in the train of the am- 
bassadors sent thither to negotiate the king's mar- 
riage. The marriage took place in May 1503, on 
which occasion the high-piled capital wore holiday 
attire, balconies blazed with scarlet cloth, and the 
loyal multitude shouted as bride and bridegroom rode 
past, with the chivalry of two kingdoms in their 
train. Early in May, Dunbar composed his most 
celebrated poem in honour of the event. Next year 
he said mass in the king's presence for the first time, 
and received a liberal reward. In 1505, he received 
a sum in addition to his stated pension, and two years 
thereafter his pension was doubled. In August 15 10, 
his pension was increased to £80 per annum, until he 
became possessed of a benefice of the annual value of 
£100 or upwards. In 15 13, Flodden was fought, and 
in the confusion consequent on the king's death, Dun- 
bar and his slowly-increasing pensions disappear from 
the records of things. We do not know whether he 
received his benefice ; we do not know the date of 
his death, and to this day his grave is secret as the 
grave of Moses. 

Knowing but little of Dunbar's life, our interest is 



Dunbar. .79 

naturally concentrated on what of his writings remain 
to us. And to modern eyes the old poet is a singular 
spectacle. His language is different from ours; his 
mental structure and modes of thought are unfamiliar ; 
in his intellectual world, as we map it out to ourselves, 
it is difficult to conceive how a comfortable existence 
could be attained. Times, manners, and ideas have 
changed, and we look upon Dunbar with a certain 
reverential wonder and curiosity as we look upon 
Tantallon, standing up, grim and gray, in the midst 
of the modern landscape. The grand old fortress 
is a remnant of a state of things which have utterly 
passed away. Curiously, as we walk beside it, we 
think of the actual human life its walls contained. 
In those great fire-places logs actually burned once, 
and in winter nights men-at-arms spread out big 
palms against the grateful heat. In those empty 
apartments was laughter, and feasting, and serious 
talk enough in troublous times, and births, and 
deaths, and the bringing home of brides in their 
blushes. This empty moat was filled with water, 
to keep at bay long-forgotten enemies, and yonder 
loop-hole was made narrow, as a protection from 
long-mouldered arrows. In Tantallon we know the 
Douglasses lived in state, and bearded kings, and 
hung out banners to the breeze ; but a sense of won- 
der is mingled with our knowledge, for the bothy of 
the Lothian farmer is even more in accordance with 
our methods of conducting life. Dunbar affects us 



8o Dunbar, 

similarly. We know that he possessed a keen intel- 
lect, a blossoming fancy, a satiric touch that blistered, 
a melody that enchanted Northern ears ; but then we 
have lost the story of his life, and from his poems, 
with their wonderful contrasts, the delicacy and spring- 
like flush of feeling, the piety, the freedom of speech, 
the irreverent use of the sacredest names, the " Flyt- 
ing" and the "Lament for the Makars," there is 
difficulty in making one's ideas of him cohere. He 
is present to the imagination, and yet remote. Like 
Tantallon, he is a portion of the past. We are 
separated from him by centuries, and that chasm we 
are unable to bridge properly. 

The first thing that strikes the reader of these 
poems is their variety and intellectual range. It 
may be said that — partly from constitutional turn of 
thought, partly from the turbulent and chaotic time 
in which he lived, when families rose to splendour 
and as suddenly collapsed, when the steed that bore 
his rider at morning to the hunting-field returned at 
evening masterless to the castle-gate— Dunbar's pre- 
vailing mood of mind is melancholy ; that he, with a 
certain fondness for the subject, as if it gave him 
actual relief, moralised over the sandy foundations of 
mortal prosperity, the advance of age putting out the 
lights of youth, and cancelling the rapture of the lover, 
and the certainty of death. This is a favourite path 
of contemplation with him, and he pursues it with a 
gloomy sedateness of acquiescence, which is more 



Dunbar. 8 1 

affecting than if he raved and foamed against the 
inevitable. But he has the mobility of the poetic 
nature, and the sad ground-tone is often drowned in 
the ecstasy of lighter notes. All at once the " bare 
ruined choirs " are covered with the glad light-green 
of spring. His genius combined the excellencies 
of many masters. His " Golden Targe " and the 
" Thistle and the Rose " are allegorical poems, full of 
colour, fancy, and music. His " Two Married Women 
and the Widow " has a good deal of Chaucer's slyness 
and humour. " The Dance of the Deadly Sins," 
with its fiery bursts of imaginative energy, its pictures 
finished at a stroke, is a prophecy of Spencer and 
Collins, and as fine as anything they have accom- 
plished ; while his " Flytings " are torrents of the 
coarsest vituperation. And there are whole flights 
of occasional poems, many of them sombre-coloured 
enough, with an ever-recurring mournful refrain, others 
satirical, but all flung off, one can see, at a sitting ; in 
the few verses the mood is exhausted, and while the 
result remains, the cause is forgotten even by himself. 
Several of these short poems are almost perfect in 
feeling and execution. The melancholy ones are full 
of a serious grace, while in the satirical a laughing 
devil of glee and malice sparkles in every line. Some 
of these latter are dangerous to touch as a thistle — all 
bristling and angry with the spikes of satiric scorn. 

In his allegorical poems— "The Golden Targe," 
" The Merle and the Nightingale," " The Thistle and 



82 Dunbar. 

the Rose," — Dunbar's fancy has full scope. As alle- 
gories, they are, perhaps, not worth much ; at all 
events, modern readers do not care for the adventures 
of " Quaking Dread and Humble Obedience ;" nor 
are they affected by descriptions of Beauty, attended 
by her damsels, Fair Having, Fine Portraiture, Plea- 
sance, and Lusty Cheer. The whole conduct and 
machinery of such things are too artificial and stilted 
for modern tastes. Stately masques are no longer 
performed in earls' mansions ; and when a sovereign 
enters a city, a fair lady, with wings, representing 
Loyalty, does not burst out of a pasteboard cloud 
and recite a poetical address to Majesty. In our 
theatres the pantomime, which was originally an 
adumbration of human life, has become degraded. 
Symbolism has departed from the boards, and bur- 
lesque reigns in its stead. The Lord Mayor's Show, 
the last remnant of the antique spectacular taste, does 
not move us now ; it is held a public nuisance ; it 
provokes the rude "chaff" of the streets. Our very 
mobs have become critical. Gog and Magog are 
dethroned. The knight feels the satiric comments 
through his armour. The very steeds ^re uneasy, as 
if ashamed. But in Dunbar the allegorical machinery 
is saved from contempt by colour, poetry, and music. 
Quick surprises of beauty, and a rapid succession of 
pictures, keep the attention awake. Now it is — 

" May, of mirthful rnonethis queen, 
Betwixt April and June, her sisters sheen, 
Within the garden walking up and down." 



Dunbar. 83 

Now — 

" The god of windis, Eolus, 
With variand look, richt like a lord unstable." 

Now the nightingale — 

" Never sweeter noise was heard with livin' man, 
Nor made this merry, gentle nightingale ; 
Her sound went with the river as it ran 
Out throw the fresh and flourished lusty vale." 

And now a spring morning — 

" Ere Phoebus was in purple cape revest, 
Up raise the lark, the heaven's minstrel fine 
In May, in till a morrow mirthful lest. 

" Full angel -like thir birdis sang their hours 
Within their curtains green, in to their bours 
Apparelled white and red with bloomes sweet ; 
Enamelled was the field with all colours, 
The pearly droppis shook in silver shours ; 
While all in balm did branch and leavis fleet. 
To part fra Phoebus did Aurora greet, 
Her crystal tears I saw hing on the flours, 
Whilk he for love all drank up with his heat. 

" For mirth of May, with skippis and with hops, 
The birdis sang upon the tender crops, 
With curious notes, as Venus' chapel clerks ; 
The roses young, new spreading of their knops, 
Were powderit bricht with heavenly beriall drops, 
Through beames red, burning as ruby sparks ; 
The skies rang for shouting of the larks, 
The purple heaven once scal't in silver slops, 
Oure gilt the trees, branches, leaves, and barks." 

The finest of Dunbar's poems in this style is the 



84 Dunbar. 

" Thistle and the Rose." It was written in celebra- 
tion of the marriage of James with the Princess 
Margaret of England, and the royal pair are happily 
represented as the national emblems. It, of course, 
opens with a description of a spring morning. Dame 
Nature resolves that every bird, beast, and flower 
should compeer before her highness ; the roe is com- 
manded to summon the animals, the restless swallow 
the birds, and the " conjured " yarrow the herbs and 
flowers. In the twinkling of an eye they stand before 
the queen. The lion and the eagle are crowned, and 
are instructed to be humble and just, and to exercise 
their powers mercifully : — 

" Then callit she all flouris that grew in field, 
Discerning all their seasons and effeirs, 

Upon the awful thistle she beheld 

And saw him keepit with a bush of spears : 
Consid'ring him so able for the weirs, 

A radius crown of rubies she him gave. 

And said, 'In field, go forth and fend the lave.' " 

The rose, also, is crowned, and the poet gives utter- 
ance to the universal joy on occasion of the mar- 
riage — type of peace between two kingdoms. Listen 
to the rich music of according voices : — 

" Then all the birds sang with voice on hicht, 

"Whose mirthful soun' was marvellous to hear ; 

The mavis sang, Hail Rose, most rich and richf, 
That does up flourish under Phoebus' sphere, 
Hail, plant of youth, hail Princess, dochter dear; 

Hail blosom breaking out of the bluid royal, 

Whose precious virtue is imperial. 



Dunbar. 85 

' ' The merle she sang, Hail, Rose of most delight, 
Hail, of all floris queen an' sovereign ! 

The lark she sang, Hail, Rose both red and white ; 
Most pleasant flower, of michty colours twane : 
The nichtingale sang, Hail, Nature's suffragane, 

In beauty, nurture, and every nobleness, 

In rich array, renown, and gentleness. 

" The common voice up raise of birdes small, 
Upon this wise, Oh, blessit be the hour 

That thou was chosen to be our principal ! 
Welcome to be our Princess of honour, 
Our pearl, our pleasance, and our paramour, 

Our peace, our play, our plain felicity ; 

Christ thee comfort from all adversity." 

But beautiful as these poems are, it is as a satirist 
that Dunbar has performed his greatest feats. He 
was by nature "dowered with the scorn of scorn," 
and its edge was whetted by life-long disappointment. 
Like Spenser, he knew — 

" What Hell it is in suing long to bide." 

And even in poems where the mood is melancholy, 
where the burden is the shortness of life and the un- 
permanence of felicity, his satiric rage breaks out in 
single lines of fire. And although his satire is often 
almost inconceivably coarse, the prompting instinct 
is healthy at bottom. He hates Vice, although his 
hand is too often in the kennel to pelt her withal. 
He lays his grasp on the bridle-rein of the sleek pre- 
late, and upbraids him with his secret sins in language 
unsuited to modern ears. His greater satires have a 



86 Dunbar. 

wild sheen of imagination about them. They are far 
from being cold, moral homilies. His wrath or his 
contempt breaks through the bounds of time and 
space, and brings the spiritual world on the stage. 
He wishes to rebuke the citizens of Edinburgh for 
their habits of profane swearing, and the . result is a 
poem, which probably gave Coleridge the hint of his 
" Devil's Walk." Dunbar's satire is entitled the 
" Devil's Inquest." He represents the Fiend passing 
up through the market, and chuckling as he listens to 
the strange oaths of cobbler, maltman, tailor, courtier, 
and minstrel. He comments on what he hears and 
sees with great pleasantry and satisfaction. Here is 
the conclusion of the piece : — 

" Ane thief said, God that ever I chaip, 
Nor ane stark widdy gar me gaip, 

But I in hell for geir wald be. 
The Devil said, ' Welcome in a raip : 

Renounce thy God, and cum to me.' 

" The fishwives net and swore with granes, 
And to the Fiend saul flesh and banes ; 

They gave them, with ane shout on hie. 
The Devil said, ' Welcome all at anes : 

Renounce your God, and cum to me.' 

"The rest of craftis great aiths swair, 
Their wark and craft had nae compair, 

Ilk ane unto their qualitie. 
The Devil said then, withouten mair, 

' Renounce your God, and cum to me.' " 

But the greatest of Dunbar's satires — in fact, the 



Dunbar. &J 

greatest of all his poems — is that entitled "The Dance 
of the Seven Deadly Sins." It is short, but within its 
compass most swift, vivid, and weird. The pictures 
rise on the reader's eye, and fade at once. It is a 
singular compound of farce and earnest. It is Spenser 
and Hogarth combined — the wildest grotesquerie 
wrought on a background of penal flame. The poet 
conceives himself in a dream, on the evening preced* 
ing Lent, and in his vision he heard Mahoun com- 
mand that the wretched who "had ne'er been shriven" 
should dance before him. Immediately a hideous rout 
present themselves; "holy harlots" appear in their 
finery, and never a smile wrinkles the faces of the on- 
lookers ; but when a string of " priests with their 
shaven necks" come in, the arches of the unnameable 
place shakes with the laughter of all the fiends. Then 
" The Seven Deadly Sins" began to leap at once : — 

" And first of all the dance was Pride, 
With, hair wyld back and bonnet on side." 

He, with all his train, came skipping through the fire. 

" Then Ire came in with sturt and strife ; 
His hand was aye upon his knife;" 

and with him came armed boasters and braggarts, 
smiting each other with swords, jagging each other 
with knives. Then Envy, trembling with secret 
hatred, accompanied by his court of flatterers, back- 
biters, and calumniators, and all the human serpentry 
that lurk in the palaces of kings. Then came Covet- 



88 Du7t5ar. 

ousness, with his hoarders and misers, and these the 
fiends gave to drink of newly-molten gold. 

" Syne Swearness, at the second bidding, 
Came like a sow out of a midding : " 

and with him danced a sleepy crew, and Belial lashed 
them with a bridle-rein, and the fiends gave them a 
turn in the fire to make them nimbler. Then came 
Lechery, led by Idleness, with a host of evil com- 
panions, " full strange of countenance, like torches 
burning bright." Then came Gluttony, so unwieldy 
that he could hardly move : — 

" Him followed mony foul drunk art 
With can and callop, cup and quart, 
In surfeit and excess." 

" Drink, aye they cried," with their parched lips ; and 
the fiends gave them hot lead to lap. Minstrels, it 
appears, are not to be found in that .dismal place : — 

" Nae minstrels played to them but doubt, 
For gleemen there were halden out 

By day and eik by nicht : 
Except a minstrel that slew a man, 
So to his heritage he wan, 

And entered by brieve of richt." 

And to the music of the solitary poet in hell, the 
strange shapes pass. The conclusion of this singu- 
lar poem is entirely farcical. The devil is resolved to 
make high holiday : — 



Dunbar, 89 

"Then cried Mahoun for a Hielan Padyane, 
Syne ran a fiend to fetch Makfadyane, 

Far north-wast in a neuck ; 
Be he the coronach had done shout, 
Ersche men so gatherit him about, 

In hell great room they took. 
Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter, 
Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter, 

And roup like raven and rook. 
The Devil sae deaved was with their yell, 
That in the deepest pot of hell 

He smorit them with smook." 

There is one other poem of Dunbar's which may 
be quoted as a contrast to what has been already 
given. It is remarkable as being the only one in 
which he assumes the character of a lover. The style 
of thought is quite modern ; bereave it of its uncouth 
orthography, and it might have been written to-day. 
It is turned with much skill and grace. The constitu- 
tional melancholy of the man comes out in it ; as, in- 
deed, it always does when he finds a serious topic. 
It possesses more tenderness and sentiment than is 
his usual. It is the night-flower among his poems, 
breathing a mournful fragrance : — 

" Sweit rose of vertew and of gentilnes, 
Delytsum lyllie of everie lustynes, 
Richest in bontie, and in beutie cleir, 
And every vertew that to hevin is dear, 
Except onlie that ye ar mercyles, 

"Into your garthe this day I did persew : 
Thair saw I fiowris that fresche wer of dew, 



90 Dunbar. 

Baith quhyte and reid most lustye wer to seyne, 
And halsum herbis upone stalkis grene : 
Yet leif nor flour fynd could I nane of rew. 

"I doute that March, with his cauld blastis keyne, 
Hes slane this gentill herbe, that I of mene ; 
Quhois pitewous deithe dois to my hart sic pane, 
That I wald mak to plant his rute agane, 
So comfortand his levis unto me bene." 



The extracts already given will enable the reader 
to form some idea of the old poet's general power — 
his music, his picturesque faculty, his colour, his 
satire. Yet it is difficult from what he has left to 
form any very definite image of the man. Although 
his poems are for the most part occasional, founded 
upon actual circumstances, or written to relieve him 
from the over-pressure of angry or melancholy moods, 
and although the writer is by no means shy or indis- 
posed to speak of himself, his personality is not made 
clear to us. There is a great gap of time between 
him and the modern reader ; and the mixture of gold 
and clay in the. products of his genius, the discrepancy 
of elements, beauty and coarseness, Apollo's cheek, 
and the satyr's shaggy limbs, are explainable partly 
from a want of harmony and completeness in himself, 
and partly from the pressure of the half-barbaric time. 
His rudeness offends, his narrowness astonishes. But 
then we must remember that our advantages in these 
respects do not necessarily arise from our being of a 
purer and nobler essence. We have these things by 



Dunbar. 9 1 

inheritance ; they have been transmitted to us along 
a line of ancestors. Five centuries share with us the 
merit of the result. Modern delicacy of taste and 
intellectual purity — although we hold them in pos- 
session, and may add to their sheen before we hand 
them on to our children — are no more to be placed 
to our personal credits than Dryden's satire, Pope's 
epigram, Marlborough's battles, Burke's speeches, and 
the victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Intellectual 
delicacy has grown like our political constitution. 
The English duke is not the creator of his own wealth, 
although in his keeping it makes the earth around 
him a garden, and the walls of his house bright with 
pictures. But our inability to conceive satisfactorily 
of Dunbar does not arise from this alone. We have 
his works, but then they are not supplemented by 
personal anecdote and letters, and the reminiscences 
of contemporaries. Burns, for instance, — if limited 
to his works for our knowledge of him, — would be a 
puzzling phenomenon. He was in his poems quite 
as unspoken as Dunbar, but then they describe so 
wide an area, they appear so contradictory, they seem 
often to lead in opposite directions. It is, to a large 
extent, through his letters that Burns is known, 
through his short, careless, pithy sayings, which im- 
bedded themselves in the memories of his hearers, 
from the recollections of his contemporaries and their 
expressed judgments, and the multiform reverberations 
of fame lingering around such a man — these fill up 



92 Dunbar, 

interstices between works, bring apparent opposition 
into intimate relationship, and make wholeness out of 
confusion. Not on the stage alone, in the world also, 
a man's real character comes out best in his asides. 
With Dunbar there is nothing of this. He is a name, 
and little more. He exists in a region to which rumour 
and conjecture have never penetrated. He was long 
neglected by his countrymen, and was brought to 
light as if by accident. He is the Pompeii of British 
poetry. We have his works, but they are like the 
circumvallations of a Roman camp on the Scottish 
hillside. We see lines stretching hither and thither, 
but we cannot make out the plan, or divine what 
purposes were served. We only know that every 
crumbled rampart was once a defence ; that every 
half-obliterated fosse once swarmed with men; that 
it was once a station and abiding-place of human life, 
although for centuries now remitted to silence and 
blank summer sunshine. 



A LARK'S FLIGHT. 

"D IGHTLY or wrongly, during the last twenty or 
thirty years a strong feeling has grown up in 
the public mind against the principle, and a still 
stronger feeling against the practice, of capital punish- 
ments. Many people who will admit that the execu- 
tion of the murderer may be, abstractly considered, 
just enough, sincerely doubt whether such execution 
be expedient, and are in their own minds perfectly 
certain that it cannot fail to demoralise the spectators. 
In consequence of this, executions have become rare ; 
and it is quite clear that many scoundrels, well 
worthy of the noose, contrive to escape it. When, 
on the occasion of a wretch being turned off, the 
spectators are few, it is remarked by the newspapers 
that the mob is beginning to lose its proverbial 
cruelty, and to be stirred by humane pulses ; when 
they are numerous, and especially when girls and 
women form a majority, the circumstance is noticed 
and deplored. It is plain enough that, if the news- 
paper considered such an exhibition beneficial, it 



94 A Lark's Flight. 

would not lament over a few thousand eager wit- 
nesses : if the sermon be edifying, you cannot have 
too large a congregation ; if you teach a moral lesson 
in a grand, impressive way, it is difficult to see how 
you can have too many pupils. Of course, neither 
the justice nor the expediency of capital- punishments 
falls to be discussed here. This, however, may be 
said, that the popular feeling against them may not 
be so admirable a proof of enlightenment as many 
believe. It is true that the spectacle is painful, hor- 
rible ; but in pain and horror there is often hidden a 
certain salutariness, and the repulsion of which we 
are conscious is as likely to arise from debilitation of 
public nerve, as from a higher reach of public feeling. 
To my own thinking, it is out of this pain and hate- 
fulness that an execution becomes invested with an 
ideal grandeur. It is sheer horror to all concerned — 
sheriffs, halbertmen, chaplain, spectators, Jack Ketch, 
and culprit ; but out of all this, and towering behind 
the vulgar and hideous accessories of the scaffold, 
gleams the majesty of implacable law. When every 
other fine morning a dozen cut-purses were hanged at 
Tyburn, and when such sights did not run very 
strongly against the popular current, the spectacle was 
vulgar, and could be of use only to the possible cut- 
purses congregated around the foot of the scaffold. 
Now, when the law has become so far merciful ; 
when the punishment of death is reserved for the 
murderer ; when he can be condemned only on the 



i 



A Lark's Flight. 95 

clearest evidence \ when, as the days draw slowly on to 
doom, the frightful event impending over one stricken 
wretch throws its shadow over the heart of every 
man, woman, and child in the great city ; and when 
the official persons whose duty it is to see the letter 
of the law carried out perform that duty at the ex- 
pense of personal pain, — a public execution is not 
vulgar, it becomes positively sublime. It is dreadful, 
of course ; but its dreadfulness melts into pure awful- 
ness. The attention is taken off the criminal, and is 
lost in a sense of the grandeur of justice ; and the 
spectator who beholds an execution, solely as it ap- 
pears to the eye, without recognition of the idea which 
towers behind it, must be a very unspiritual and un- 
imaginative spectator indeed. 

It is taken for granted that the spectators of public 
executions — the artisans and country people who take 
up their stations over-night as close to the barriers as 
possible, and the wealthier classes who occupy hired 
windows and employ opera-glasses — are merely drawn 
together by a morbid relish for horrible sights. He 
is a bold man who will stand forward as the ad- 
vocate of such persons — so completely is the popu- 
lar mind made up as to their tastes and motives. 
It is not disputed that the large body of the mob, 
and of the occupants of windows, have been drawn 
together by an appetite for excitement ; but it is quite 
possible that many come there from an impulse al- 
together different. Just consider the nature of the 



g6 A Lark's Flight. 

expected sight, — a man in tolerable health probably, 
in possession of all his faculties, perfectly able to 
realise his position, conscious that for him this world 
and the next are so near that only a few seconds 
divide them — such a man stands in the seeing of 
several thousand eyes. He is so peculiarly circum- 
stanced, so utterly lonely, — hearing the tolling of his 
own death-bell, yet living, wearing the mourning 
clothes for his own funeral, — that he holds the multi- 
tude together by a shuddering fascination. The 
sight is a peculiar one, you must admit, and every 
peculiarity has . its attractions. Your volcano is more 
attractive than your ordinary mountain. Then con- 
sider the unappeasable curiosity as to death which 
haunts every human being, and how pathetic that 
curiosity is, in so far as it suggests our own ignorance 
and helplessness, and we see at once that people 
may flock to public executions for other purposes 
than the gratification of morbid tastes : that they 
would pluck if they could some little knowledge of 
what death is ; that imaginatively they attempt to 
reach to it, to touch and handle it through an ex- 
perience which is not their own. It is some obscure 
desire of this kind, a movement of curiosity not alto- 
gether ignoble, but in some degree pathetic ; some 
rude attempt of the imagination to wrest from the 
death of the criminal information as to the great 
secret in which each is profoundly interested, which 
draws around the scaffold people from the country 



A Lark's Flight. 97 

harvest-fields, and from the streets and alleys of the 
town. Nothing interests men so much as death. 
Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale it. "A 
greater crowd would come to see me hanged," Crom- 
well is reported to have said when the populace came 
forth on a public occasion. The Lord Protector was 
right in a sense of which, perhaps, at the moment he 
was not aware. Death is greater than official posi- 
tion. ■ When a man has to die, he may safely dispense 
with stars and ribbands. He is invested with a 
greater dignity than is held in the gift of kings. A 
greater crowd would have gathered to see Cromwell 
hanged, but . the compliment would have been paid 
to death rather than to Cromwell. Never were the 
motions of Charles I. so scrutinised as when he stood 
for a few moments on the scaffold that winter morn- 
ing at Whitehall. King Louis was no great orator 
usually, but when on the 2d January 1793 he at- 
tempted to speak a few words in the Place De 
la Revolution, it was found necessary to drown his 
voice in a harsh roll of soldiers' drums. Not without 
a meaning do people come forth to see men die. 
We stand in the valley, they on the hill-top, and on 
their faces strikes the light of the other world, and 
from some sign or signal of theirs we attempt to dis- 
cover or extract a hint of what it is all like. 

To be publicly put to death, for whatever reason, 
must ever be a serious matter. It is always bitter, 
but there are degrees in its bitterness. It is easy to 



98 A Lark's Flight. 

die like Stephen with an opened heaven above you, 
crowded with angel faces. It is easy to die like 
Balmerino with a chivalrous sigh for the White Rose, 
and an audible " God bless King James." Such men 
die for a cause in which they glory, and are supported 
thereby ; they are conducted to the portals of the next 
world by the angels, Faith, Pity, Admiration. But it 
is not easy to die in expiation of a crime like murder, 
which engirdles you with trembling and horror even 
in the loneliest places, which cuts you off from the 
sympathies of your kind, which reduces the universe 
to two elements — a sense of personal identity, and a 
memory of guilt. In so dying, there must be incon- 
ceivable bitterness ; a man can have no other support 
than what strength he may pluck from despair, or 
from the iron with which nature may have originally 
braced heart and nerve. Yet, taken as a whole, 
criminals on the scaffold comport themselves credit- 
ably. They look Death in the face when he wears 
his cruelest aspect, and if they flinch somewhat, they 
can at least bear to look. I believe that, for the 
criminal, execution within the prison walls, with no 
witnesses save some half-dozen official persons, would 
be infinitely more terrible than execution in the pre- 
• sence of a curious, glaring mob. The daylight and 
the publicity are alien elements, which wean the 
man a little from himself. He steadies his dizzy 
brain on the crowd beneath and around him. He 
has his last part to play, and his manhood rallies 



A Lark's Flight. 99 

to play it well. Nay, so subtly is vanity intertwined 
with our motives, the noblest and the most ignoble, 
that I can fancy a poor wretch with the noose dang- 
ling at his ear, and with barely five minutes to live, 
soothed somewhat with the idea that his firmness and 
composure will earn him the approbation, perhaps 
the pity, of the spectators. He would take with him, 
if he could, the good opinion of his fellows. This 
composure of criminals puzzles one. Have they 
looked at death so long and closely, that familiarity 
has robbed it of terror 1 Has life treated them so 
harshly, that they are tolerably well pleased to be quit 
of it on any terms 1 Or is the whole thing mere blind 
stupor and delirium, in which thought is paralysed, 
and the man an automaton ? Speculation is useless. 
The fact remains that criminals for the most part die 
well and bravely. It is said that the championship 
of England was to be decided at some little distance 
from London on the morning of the day on which 
Thurtell was executed, and that, when he came out 
on the scaffold, he inquired privily of the executioner 
if the result had yet become known. Jack Ketch 
was not aware, and Thurtell expressed his regret that 
the ceremony in which he was chief actor should take 
place so inconveniently early in the day. Think of 
a poor Thurtell forced to take his long journey an 
hour, perhaps, before the arrival of intelligence so 
important ! 

More than twenty years ago I saw two men exe- 



ioo A Lark's Flight. 

cuted, and the impression then made remains fresh 
to this day. For this there were many reasons. The 
deed for which the men suffered created an immense 
sensation. They were hanged on the spot where the 
murder was committed — on a rising ground, some 
four miles north-east of the city ; and as an attempt 
at rescue was apprehended, there was a considerable 
display of military force on the occasion. And when, 
in the dead silence of thousands, the criminals stood 
beneath the halters, an incident occurred, quite natural 
and slight in itself, but when taken in connexion with 
the business then proceeding, so unutterably tragic, 
so overwhelming in its pathetic suggestion of con- 
trast, that the feeling of it has never departed, and 
never will. At the time, too, I speak of, I was very 
young; the world was like a die newly cut, whose 
every impression is fresh and vivid. 

While the railway which connects two northern 
capitals was being built, two brothers from Ireland, 
named Doolan, were engaged upon it in the capacity 
of navvies. For some fault or negligence, one of the 
brothers was dismissed by the overseer — a Mr Green 
■ — of that particular portion of the line on which they 
were employed. The dismissed brother went off in 
search of work, and the brother who remained — 
Dennis was the Christian name of him— brooded 
over this supposed wrong, and in his dull, twilighted 
brain revolved projects of vengeance. He did not 



A Lark's Flight. 101 

absolutely mean to take Green's life, but he meant to 
thrash him to within an inch of it. Dennis, anxious 
to thrash Green, but not quite seeing his way to it, 
opened his mind one afternoon, when work was over, 
to his friends — fellow-Irishmen and navvies — Messrs 
Redding and Hickie. These took up Doolan's wrong 
as their own, and that evening, by the dull light of a 
bothy fire, they held a rude parliament, discussing 
ways and means of revenge. It was arranged that 
Green should be thrashed — the amount of thrashing 
left an open question, to be decided, unhappily, when 
the blood was up and the cinder of rage blown into a 
flame. Hickie's spirit was found not to be a mount- 
ing one, and it was arranged that the active partners 
in the game should be Doolan and Redding. Doolan, 
as the aggrieved party, was to strike the first blow, 
and Redding, as the aggrieved party's particular friend, 
asked and obtained permission to strike the second. 
The main conspirators, with a fine regard for the feel- 
ings of the weaker Hickie, allowed him to provide the 
weapons of assault, — so that by some slight filament 
of aid he might connect himself with the good cause. 
The unambitious Hickie at once applied himself to 
his duty. He went out, and in due time returned 
with two sufficient iron pokers. The weapons were ex- 
amined, approved of, and carefully laid aside. Doolan, 
Redding, and Hickie ate their suppers, and retired 
to their several couches to sleep, peacefully enough 



102 A Larks Flight. 

no doubt. About the same time, too, Green, the 
English overseer, threw down his weary limbs, and 
entered on his last sleep — little dreaming what the 
morning had in store for him. 

Uprose the sun, and uprose Doolan and Redding, 
and dressed, and thrust each his sufficient iron poker 
up the sleeve of his blouse, and went forth. They 
took up their station on a temporary wooden bridge 
which spanned the line, and waited there. Across 
the bridge, as was expected, did Green ultimately 
come. He gave them good morning ; asked, " why 
they were loafing about 1 ?" received no very pertinent 
answer, perhaps did not care to receive one ; whistled 
— the unsuspecting man ! — thrust his hands into his 
breeches pockets, turned his back on them, and leaned 
over the railing of the bridge, inspecting the progress 
of the works beneath. The temptation was really 
too great. What could wild Irish flesh and blood do? 
In a moment out from the sleeve of Doolan's blouse 
came the hidden poker, and the first blow was struck, 
bringing Green to the ground. The friendly Red- 
ding, who had bargained for the second, and who, 
naturally enough, was in fear of being cut out alto- 
gether, jumped on the prostrate man, and fulfilled 
his share of the bargain with a will. It was Redding 
it was supposed who sped the unhappy Green. They 
overdid their work — like young authors — giving many 
more blows than were sufficient, and then fled. The 
works, of course, were that morning in consternation. 



A Lark's Flight. 103 

Redding and Hickie were, if I remember rightly, 
apprehended in the course of the day. Doolan got 
off, leaving no trace of his whereabouts. 

These particulars were all learned subsequently. 
The first intimation which we schoolboys received of 
anything unusual having occurred, was the sight of a 
detachment of soldiers with fixed bayonets, trousers 
rolled up over muddy boots, marching past the front 
of the Cathedral hurriedly home to barracks. This 
was a circumstance somewhat unusual. We had, of 
course, frequently seen a couple of soldiers trudging 
along with sloped muskets, and that cruel glitter of 
steel which no one of us could look upon quite un- 
moved ; but in such cases, the deserter walking between 
them in his shirt-sleeves, his pinioned hands covered 
from public gaze by the loose folds of his great-coat, 
explained everything. But from the hurried march 
of these mud-splashed men, nothing could be gathered, 
and we were left to speculate upon its meaning. 
Gradually, however, before the evening fell, the ru- 
mour of a murder having been committed spread 
through the city, and with that I instinctively con- 
nected the apparition of the file of muddy soldiers. 
Next day, murder was in every mouth. My school- 
fellows talked of it to the detriment of their lessons ; 
it flavoured the tobacco of the fustian artizan as he 
smoked to work after breakfast ; it walked on 'Change 
amongst the merchants. It was known that two of 
the persons implicated had been captured, but that 



104 A Lark's Flight. 

the other, and guiltiest, was still at large ; and in a few 
days out on every piece of boarding and blank wall 
came the " Hue and cry" — describing Doolan like a 
photograph, to the colour and cut of his whiskers, and 
offering £100 as reward for his apprehension, or for 
such information as would lead to his apprehension — ■ 
like a silent, implacable bloodhound following close 
on the track of the murderer. This terrible broad- 
sheet I read, was certain that he had read it also, and 
fancy ran riot over the ghastly fact. For him no hope, 
no rest, no peace, no touch of hands gentler than the 
hangman's ; all the world is after him like a roaring 
prairie of flame ! I thought of Doolan, weary, foot- 
sore, heart-sore, entering some quiet village of an even- 
ing ; and to quench his thirst, going up to the public 
well, around which the gossips are talking, and hear- 
ing that they were talking of him; and seeing from the 
well itself, it glaring upon him, as if conscious of his 
presence, with a hundred eyes of vengeance. I thought 
of him asleep in out-houses, and starting up in wild 
dreams of the policeman's hand upon his shoulder fifty 
times ere morning. He had committed the crime of 
Cain, and the weird of Cain he had to endure. But 
yesterday innocent, how unimportant ; to-day bloody- 
handed, the whole world is talking of him, and every- 
thing he touches, the very bed he sleeps on, steals 
from him his secret, and is eager to betray ! 

Doolan was finally captured in Liverpool, and in 
the Spring Assize the three men were brought to trial. 



A Lark's Flight. 105 

The jury found them guilty, but recommended Hickie 
to mercy on account of some supposed weakness of 
mind on his part. Sentence was, of course, pro- 
nounced with the usual solemnities. They were set 
apart to die ; and when snug abed o' nights — for im- 
agination is most mightily moved by contrast — I crept 
into their desolate hearts, and tasted a misery which 
was not my own. As already said, Hickie was re- 
commended to mercy, and the recommendation was 
ultimately in the proper quarter given effect to. 

The evening before the execution has arrived, and 
the reader has now to imagine the early May sunset 
falling pleasantly on the outskirts of the city. The 
houses looking out upon an open square or space, 
have little plots of garden-ground in their fronts, in 
which mahogany -coloured wall- flowers and mealy 
auriculas are growing. The side of this square, 
along which the City Road stretches northward, is 
occupied by a blind asylum, a brick building, the 
bricks painted red and picked out with white, after 
the tidy English fashion, and a high white cemetery 
wall, over which peers the spire of the Gothic Cathe- 
dral ; and beyond that, on the other side of the ravine, 
rising out of a populous city of the dead, a stone 
John Knox looks down on the Cathedral, a Bible 
clutched in his outstretched and menacing hand. On 
all this the May sunset is striking, dressing everything 
in its wann, pleasant pink, lingering in the tufts of 
foliage that nestle around the asylum, and dipping 



106 A Lark's Flight. 

the building itself one half in light, one half in tender 
shade. This open space or square is an excellent 
place for the games of us boys, and "Prisoners Base" 
is being carried out with as much earnestness as the 
business of life now by those of us who are left. The 
girls, too, have their games of a quiet kind, which we 
hold in huge scorn and contempt. In two files, 
linked arm-in-arm, they alternately dance towards 
each other and then retire, singing the while, in their 
clear, girlish treble, verses, the meaning and pertinence 
of which time has worn away — ■ 

" The Campsie Duke 's a-riding, a-riding, a-riding," 

being the oft-recurring "owercome" or refrain. All 
this is going on in the pleasant sunset light, when by 
the apparition of certain waggons coming up from the 
city, piled high with blocks and beams, and guarded by 
a dozen dragoons, on whose brazen helmets the sunset 
danced, every game is dismembered, and we are in a 
moment a mere mixed mob of boys and girls, flocking 
around to stare and wonder. Just at this place some- 
thing went wrong with one of the waggon wheels, and 
the procession came to a stop. A crowd collected, 
and we heard some of the grown-up people say, that 
the scaffold was being carried out for the ceremony 
of to-morrow. Then, more intensely than ever, one 
realised the condition of the doomed men. We were 
at our happy games in the sunset, they were entering 
on their last night on earth. After hammering and 



A Lark's Flight. 107 

delay the wheel was put to rights, the sunset died out, 
waggons and dragoons got into motion and disappeared ; 
and all the night through, whether awake or asleep, I 
saw the torches burning, and heard the hammers 
clinking, and witnessed as clearly as if I had been an 
onlooker, the horrid structure rising, till it stood com- 
plete, with a huge cross-beam from which two empty 
halters hung, in the early morning light. 

Next morning the whole city was in commotion. 
Whether the authorities were apprehensive that a 
rescue would be attempted, or were anxious merely 
to strike terror into the hundreds of wild Irishry 
engaged on the railway, I cannot say ; in any case, 
there was a display of military force quite unusual. 
The carriage in which the criminals — Catholics both — 
and their attendant priests were seated, was guarded 
by soldiers with fixed bayonets ; indeed, the whole 
regiment then lying in the city was massed in front 
and behind, with a cold, frightful glitter of steel. 
Besides the foot soldiers, there were dragoons, and two 
pieces of cannon ; a whole little army, in fact. With 
a slenderer force battles have been won which have 
made a mark in history. What did the prisoners 
think of their strange importance, and of the tramp 
and hurly-burly all around? When the procession 
moved out of the city, it seemed to draw with it 
almost the entire population; and when once the 
country roads were reached, the crowd spread over 
the fields on either side, ruthlessly treading down the 



108 A Lark's Flight. 

tender wheat braird. I got a glimpse of the doomed, 
blanched faces which had haunted me so long, at the 
turn of the road, where, for the first time, the black 
cross-beam with its empty halters first became visible 
to them. Both turned and regarded it with a long, 
steady look • that done, they again bent their heads 
attentively to the words of the clergyman. I suppose 
in that long, eager, fascinated gaze they practically 
died — that for them death had no additional bitter- 
ness. When the mound was reached on which the 
scaffold stood, there was immense confusion. Around 
it a wide space was kept clear by the military ; the 
cannon were placed in position ; out flashed the 
swords of the dragoons ; beneath and around on every 
side was the crowd. Between two brass helmets I 
could see the scaffold clearly enough, and when in 
a little while the men, bareheaded and with their 
attendants, appeared upon it, the surging crowd be- 
came stiffened with fear and awe. And now it was 
that the incident so simple, so natural, so much in 
the ordinary course of things, and yet so frightful in 
its tragic suggestions, took place. Be it remembered 
that the season was early May, that the day was fine, 
that the wheat-fields were clothing themselves in the 
green of the young crop, and that around the scaffold, 
standing on a sunny mound, a wide space was kept 
clear. When the men appeared beneath the beam, 
each under his proper halter, there was a dead 
silence, — every one was gazing too intently to whisper 



A Lark's Flight. 109 

to his neighbour even. Just then, out of the grassy 
space at the foot of the scaffold, in the dead silence 
audible to all, a lark rose from the side of its nest, 
and went singing upward in its happy flight. O 
heaven ! how did that song translate itself into dying 
ears? Did it bring in one wild burning moment 
Father, and mother, and poor Irish cabin, and prayers 
said at bed-time, and the smell of turf fires, and 
innocent sweethearting, and rising and setting suns'? 
Did it — but the dragoon's horse has become restive, 
and his brass helmet bobs up and down and blots 
everything; and there is a sharp sound, and I feel 
the great crowd heave and swing, and hear it torn by 
a sharp shiver of pity, and the men whom I saw so 
near but a moment ago are at immeasurable distance, 
and have solved the great enigma, — and the lark has 
not yet finished his flight : you can see and hear him 
yonder in the fringe of a white May cloud. 

This ghastly lark's flight, when the circumstances 
are taken into consideration, is, I am inclined to 
think, more terrible than anything of the same kind 
which I have encountered in books. The artistic 
uses of contrast as background and accompaniment, 
are well known to nature and the poets. Joy is con- 
tinually worked on sorrow, sorrow on joy; riot is 
framed in peace, peace in riot. Lear and the Fool al- 
ways go together. Trafalgar is being fought while Na- 
poleon is sitting on horseback watching the Austrian 
army laying down its arms at' Ulm. In Hood's 



no A Lark's Flight. 

poem, it is when looking on the released schoolboys 
at their games that Eugene Aram remembers he is a 
murderer. And these two poor Irish labourers could 
not die without hearing a lark singing in their ears. 
It is Nature's fashion. She never quite goes along 
with us. She is sombre at weddings, sunny at fune- 
rals, and she frowns on ninety-nine out of a hundred 
pic-nics. 

There is a stronger element of terror in this inci- 
dent of the lark than in any story of a similar kind 
I can remember. 

A good story is told of an Irish gentleman — ■ 
still known in London society — who inherited the 
family estates and the family banshee. The es- 
tates he lost — no uncommon circumstance in the 
history of Irish gentlemen, — but the banshee, who 
expected no favours, stuck to him in his adversity, 
and crossed the channel with him, making herself 
known only on occasions of death-beds and sharp 
family misfortunes. This gentleman had an ear, and, 
seated one night at the opera, the keen — heard once 
or twice before on memorable occasions — thrilled 
through the din of the orchestra and the passion of 
the singers. He hurried home of course, found his 
immediate family well, but on the morrow a tele- 
gram arrived with the announcement of a brother's 
death. Surely of all superstitions that is the most 
imposing which makes the other world interested in 
the events which befall our mortal lot. For the mere 



A Lark's Flight 1 1 1 

pomp and pride of it, your ghost is worth a dozen 
retainers, and it is entirely inexpensive. The pecu- 
liarity and supernatural worth of this story lies in the 
idea of the old wail piercing through the sweet entangle- 
ment of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi. 
Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, 
and reveal for a moment misty and aboriginal time 
big with portent. There is a ridiculous Scotch story 
in which one gruesome touch lives. A clergyman's 
female servant was seated in the kitchen one Satur- 
day night reading the Scriptures, when she was some- 
what startled by hearing at the door the tap and 
voice of her sweetheart. Not expecting him, and the 
hour being somewhat late, she opened it in. astonish- 
ment, and was still more astonished to hear him on 
entering abuse Scripture-reading. He behaved alto- 
gether in an unprecedented manner, and in many 
ways terrified the poor girl. Ultimately he knelt be- 
fore her, and laid his head on her lap. You can 
fancy her consternation when glancing down she dis- 
covered that, instead of hair, the head was covered 
with the moss of the moorland. By a sacred name 
she adjured him to tell who he was, and in a moment 
the figure was gone. It was the Fiend, of course — 
diminished sadly since Milton saw him bridge chaos 
— fallen from worlds to kitchen-wenches. But just 
think how in the story, in half-pity, in half-terror, the 
popular feeling of homelessness, of being outcast, 
of being unsheltered as waste and desert places, 



ii2 A Lark's Flight. 

has incarnated itself in that strange covering of the 
head. It is a true supernatural touch. One other 
story I have heard in the misty Hebrides : A Skye 
gentleman was riding along an empty moorland 
road. All at once, as if it had sprung from the 
ground, the empty road was crowded by a funeral 
procession. Instinctively he drew his horse to a side 
to let it pass, which it did without sound of voice, 
without tread of foot. Then he knew it was an 
apparition. Staring on it, he knew every person who 
either bore the corpse or who walked behind as 
mourners. There were the neighbouring proprietors 
at whose houses he dined, there were the members of 
his own kirk-session, there were the men to whom he 
was wont to give good-morning when he met them on 
the road or at market. Unable to discover his own 
image in the throng, he was inwardly marvelling 
whose funeral it could be, when the troDp of spectres 
vanished, and the road, was empty as before. Then, 
remembering that the coffin had an invisible occu- 
pant, he cried out, "It is my funeral ! " and, with all 
his strength taken out of him, rode home to die. All 
these stories have their own touches of terror ; yet I 
am inclined to think that my lark rising from the 
scaffold foot, and singing to two such auditors, is 
more terrible than any one of them. 



CHRISTMAS. 

/^\VER the dial-face of the year, on which the 
hours are months, the apex resting in sunshine, 
the base in withered leaves and snows, the finger of 
time does not travel with the same rapidity. Slowly 
it creeps up from snow to sunshine ; when it has 
gained the summit it seems almost to rest for a little ; 
rapidly it rushes down from sunshine to the snow. 
Judging from my own feelings, the distance from 
January to June is greater than from June to January 
— the period from Christmas to Midsummer seems 
longer than the period from Midsummer to Christ- 
mas. This feeling arises, I should fancy, from the 
preponderance of light on that half of the dial on 
which the finger seems to be travelling upwards, com- 
pared with the half on which it seems to be travelling 
downwards. This light to the eye, the mind trans- 
lates into time. -Summer days are long, often weari- 
somely so. The long-lighted days are bracketed to- 
gether by a little bar of twilight, in which but a star 
or two find time to twinkle. Usually one has less 
occupation in summer than in winter, and the surplus- 



H4 Christmas. 

age of summer light, a stage too large for the play, 
wearies, oppresses, sometimes appals. From the 
sense of time we can only shelter ourselves by oc- 
cupation ; and when occupation ceases while yet 
some three or four hours of light remain, the burden 
falls down, and is often greater than we can bear. 
Personally, I have a certain morbid fear of those 
endless summer twilights. A space of light stretch- 
ing from half-past 2 a.m. to n p.m. affects me with 
a sense of infinity, of horrid sameness, just as the 
sea or the desert would do. I feel that for too long 
a period I am under the eye of a taskmaster. Twi- 
light is always in itself, or at least in its suggestions, 
melancholy; and these midsummer twilights are so 
long, they pass through such series of lovely change, 
they are throughout so mournfully beautiful, that 
in the brain they beget strange thoughts, and in 
the heart strange feelings. We see too much of the 
sky, and the long, lovely, pathetic, lingering even- 
ing light, with its suggestions of eternity and death, 
which one cannot for the soul of one put into 
words, is somewhat too much for the comfort of a 
sensitive human mortal. The day dies, and makes 
no apology for being such an unconscionable time 
in dying; and all the while it colours our thoughts 
with its own solemnity. There is no relief from this 
kind of thing at midsummer. You cannot close 
your shutters and light your candles ; that in the tone 
of mind which circumstances superinduce would be 



Christmas. 115 

brutality. You cannot take Pickwick to the window 
and read it by the dying light; that is profana- 
tion. If you have a friend with you, you can't talk • 
the hour makes you silent. ' You are driven in on 
your self-consciousness. The long light wearies the 
eye, a sense of time disturbs and saddens the spirit ; 
and that is the reason, I think, that one half of the 
year seems so much longer than the other half; that 
on the dial-plate whose hours are months, the restless 
finger seems to move more slowly when travelling up- 
ward from autumn leaves and snow to light, than 
when it is travelling downward from light to snow and 
withered leaves. 

Of all the seasons of the year, I like winter best. 
That peculiar burden of time I have been speaking of, 
does not affect me now. The day is short, and I 
can fill it with work; when evening comes, I have 
my lighted room and my books. Should black care 
haunt me, I throw it off the scent in Spenser's forests, 
or seek refuge from it among Shakspeare's men and 
women, who are by far the best company I have met 
with, or am like to meet with, on earth. I am sitting 
at this present moment with my curtains drawn ; the 
cheerful fire is winking at all the furniture in the room, 
and from every leg and arm the furniture is winking 
to the fire in return. I put off the outer world with 
my greatcoat and boots, and put on contentment and 
idleness with my slippers. On the hearth-rug, Pepper, 
coiled in a shaggy ball, is asleep in the ruddy light 



1 1 6 Christmas. 

and heat. An imaginative sense of the cold outside 
increases my present comfort — just as one never 
hugs one's own good luck so affectionately as when 
listening to the relation of some horrible misfortune 
which has overtaken others. Winter has fallen on 
Dreamthorp, and it looks as pretty when covered 
with snow, as when covered with apple blossom. 
Outside, the ground is hard as iron ■ and over the low 
dark hill, lo ! the tender radiance that precedes the 
morn. Every window in the little village has its 
light, and to the traveller coming on, enveloped in his 
breath, the whole place shines like a congregation of 
glow-worms. A pleasant enough sight to him if his 
home be there ! At this present season, the canal is 
not such a pleasant promenade as it was in summer. 
The barges come and go as usual, but at this time I 
do not envy the bargemen quite so much. The horse 
comes smoking along ; the tarpaulin which covers the 
merchandise is sprinkled with hoar frost; and the helms- 
man, smoking his short pipe for the mere heat of it, 
cowers over a few red cinders contained in a frame- 
work of iron. The labour of the poor fellows will 
soon be over for a time ; for if this frost continues, the 
canal will be sheathed in a night, and next day 
stones will be thrown upon it, and a daring urchin 
venturing upon it will go souse head over heels, and 
run home with his teeth in a chatter; and the day 
after, the lake beneath the old castle will be sheeted, 
and the next, the villagers will be sliding on its 



Christmas. 117 

gleaming face from ruddy dawn at nine to ruddy 
eve at three ; and hours later, skaters yet unsatis- 
fied will be moving ghost-like in the gloom — now 
one, now another, shooting on sounding irons into 
a clear space of frosty light, chasing the moon, or 
the flying image of a star ! Happy youths leaning 
against the frosty wind ! 

I am a Christian I hope, although far from a muscu- 
lar one — consequently I cannot join the skaters on 
the lake. The floor of ice, with the people upon it, 
will be but a picture to me. And, in truth, it is in its 
pictorial aspect that I chiefly love the bleak season. 
As an artist, winter can match summer any day. 
The heavy, feathery flakes have been falling all the 
night through, we shall suppose, and when you get 
up in the morning the world is draped in white. 
What a sight it is ! It is the world you knew, but yet 
a different one. The familiar look has gone, and 
another has taken its place ; and a not unpleasant 
puzzlement arises in your mind, born of the patent and 
the remembered aspect. It reminds you of a friend 
who has been suddenly placed in new circumstances, 
in whom there is much that you recognise, and much 
that is entirely strange. How purely, divinely white 
when the last snow-flake has just fallen ! How ex- 
quisite and virginal the repose ! It touches you like 
some perfection of music. And winter does not work 
only on a broad scale ; he is careful in trifles. Pluck 
a single ivy leaf from the old wall, and see what a 



1 1 8 Christmas. 

jeweller he is ! How he has silvered over the dark- 
green reticulations with his frosts ! The faggot which 
the Tramp gathers for his fire is thicklier incrusted 
with gems than ever was sceptre of the Moguls. Go 
into the woods, and behold on the black boughs his 
glories of pearl and diamond — pendant splendours 
that, smitten by the noon-ray, melt into tears and fall 
but to congeal into splendours again. Nor does 
he work in black and white alone. He has on his 
palette 'more gorgeous colours than those in which 
swim the summer setting suns ; and with these, about 
three o'clock, he begins to adorn his west, sticking 
his red hot ball of a sun in the very midst ; and a 
couple of hours later, when the orb has fallen, and the 
flaming crimson has mellowed into liquid orange, you 
can see the black skeletons of trees scribbled upon 
the melancholy glory. Nor need I speak of the mag- 
nificence of a winter midnight, when space, sombre 
blue, crowded with star and planet, "burnished by 
the frost," is glittering like the harness of an arch- 
angel full panoplied against a battle day. 

For years and years now I have watched the sea- 
sons come and go around Dreamthorp, and each in 
its turn interests me as if I saw it for the first time. 
But the other week it seems that I saw the grain 
ripen ; then by day a motley crew of reapers were in 
the fields, and at night a big red moon looked down 
upon the stooks of oats and barley; then in mighty 
wains the plenteous harvest came swaying home, 



Christmas. 119 

leaving a largess on the roads for every bird ; then 
the round, yellow, comfortable-looking stacks stood 
around the farm-houses, hiding them to the chimneys ; 
then the woods reddened, the beech hedges became 
russet, and every puff of wind made rustle the withered 
leaves ; then the sunset came before the early dark, 
and in the east lay banks of bleak pink vapour, which 
are ever a prophecy of cold ; then out of a low dingy 
heaven came all day, thick and silent, the whirling 
snow; — and so by exquisite succession of sight and 
sound have I been taken from the top of the year to 
the bottom of it, from midsummer, with its unreaped 
harvests, to the night on which I am sitting here — 
Christmas 1862. 

Sitting here, I incontinently find myself holding a 
levee of departed Christmas nights. Silently, and 
without special call, into my study of imagination 
come these apparitions, clad in snowy mantles, 
brooched and gemmed with frosts. Their numbers 
I do not care to count, for I know they are the 
numbers of my years. The visages of two or three 
are sad enough, but on the whole 'tis a congrega- 
tion of jolly ghosts. The nostrils of my memory 
are assailed by a faint odour of plum-pudding and 
burnt brandy. I hear a sound as of light music, a 
whisk of women's dresses whirled round in dance, a 
click as of glasses pledged by friends. Before one 
of these apparitions is a mound, as of a new-made 
grave, on which the snow is lying. I know, I know ! 



1 20 Christmas. 

Drape thyself not in white like the others, but in 
mourning stole of crape ; and instead of dance music, 
let there haunt around thee the service for the dead ! 
I know that sprig of Mistletoe, O Spirit in the midst ! 
Under it I swung the girl I loved — girl no more now 
than I am boy — and kissed her spite of blush and 
pretty shriek. And thou, too, with fragrant trencher 
in hand, over which blue tongues of flame are play- 
ing, do I know — most ancient apparition of them all. 
I remember thy reigning night. Back to very days 
of childhood am I taken by thy ghostly raisins sim- 
mering in a ghostly brandy flame. Where now the 
merry boys and girls that thrust their fingers in thy 
blaze? And now, when I think of it, thee also 
would I drape in black raiment, around thee also 
would I make the burial service murmur. 

Men hold the anniversaries of their birth, of their 
marriage, of the birth of their first-born, and they 
hold — although they spread no feast, and ask no 
friends to assist — many another anniversary besides. 
On many a day in every year does a man remember 
what took place on that self-same day in some former 
year, and chews the sweet or bitter herb of memory, 
as the case may be. Could I ever hope to write a 
decent Essay, I should like to write one " On the 
Revisiting of Places/' It is strange how important 
the poorest human being is to himself ! how he likes 
to double back on his experiences, to stand on the 
place he has stood before, to meet himself face to 



Christmas. 121 

face as it were ! I go to the great city in which my 
early life was spent, and I love to indulge myself in 
this whim. The only thing I care about is that por- 
tion of the city which is connected with myself. I 
don't think this passion of reminiscence is debased 
by the slightest taint of vanity. The lamp-post, under 
the light of which in the winter rain there was a part- 
ing so many years ago, I contemplate with the most 
curious interest. I stare on the windows of the 
houses in which I once lived, with a feeling which I 
should find difficult to express in words. I think of 
the life I led there, of the good and the bad news 
that came, of the sister who died, of the brother who 
was born ; and were it at all possible, I should like to 
knock at the once familiar door, and look at the old 
walls — which could speak to me so strangely — once 
again. To revisit that city is like walking away back 
with my yesterdays. I startle myself with myself at the 
corners of streets, I confront forgotten bits of myself 
at the entrance to houses. In windows which to 
another man would seem blank and meaningless, I 
find personal poems too deep to be ever turned into 
rhymes — more pathetic, mayhap, than I have ever 
found on printed page. The spot of ground on which 
a man has stood is for ever interesting to him. Every 
experience is an anchor holding him the more firmly 
to existence. It is for this reason that we hold our 
sacred days, silent and solitary anniversaries of joy 
and bitterness, renewing ourselves thereby, going back 



12 2 Christmas. 

upon ourselves, living over again the memorable ex- 
perience. The full yellow moon of next September 
will gather into itself the light of the full yellow moons 
of Septembers long ago. In this Christinas night all 
the other Christmas nights of my life live. How 
warm, breathing, full of myself is the year 1862, now 
almost gone ! How bare, cheerless, unknown, the 
year 1863, about to come in ! It stretches before me 
in imagination like some great, gaunt untenanted ruin 
of a Colosseum, in which no footstep falls, no voice is 
heard ; and by this night year its naked chambers and 
windows, three hundred and sixty-five in number, will 
be clothed all over, and hidden by myself as if with 
covering ivies. Looking forward into an empty year 
strikes one with a certain awe, because one finds 
therein no recognition. The years behind have a 
friendly aspect, and they are warmed by the fires we 
have kindled, and all their echoes are the echoes of 
our own voices. 

This, then, is Christmas 1862. Everything is 
silent in Dreamthorp. The smith's hammer reposes 
beside the anvil. The weaver's flying shuttle is at 
rest. Through the clear wintry sunshine the bells 
this morning rang from the gray church tower amid 
the leafless elms, and up the walk the villagers trooped 
in their best dresses and their best faces — the latter 
a little reddened by the sharp wind : mere redness 
in the middle aged ; in the maids, wonderful bloom 
to the eyes of their lovers — and took their places 



Christmas. 123 

decently in the ancient pews. The clerk read the 
beautiful prayers of our Church, which seem more 
beautiful at Christmas than at any other period. For 
that very feeling which breaks down at this time the 
barriers which custom, birth, or wealth have erected 
between man and man, strikes down the barrier of 
time which intervenes between the worshipper of to- 
day and the great body of worshippers who are at rest 
in their graves. On such a day as this, hearing these 
prayers, we feel a kinship with the devout generations 
who heard them long ago. The devout lips of the 
Christian dead murmured the responses which we 
now murmur; along this road of prayer did their 
thoughts of our innumerable dead, our brothers and 
sisters in faith and hope, approach the Maker, even as 
ours at present approach Him. Prayers over, the 
clergyman — who is no Boanerges, or Chrysostom, 
golden-mouthed, but a loving, genial-hearted, pious 
man, the whole extent of his life from boyhood until 
now, full of charity and kindly deeds, as autumn fields 
with heavy wheaten ears ; the clergyman, I say — for 
the sentence is becoming unwieldy on my hands, and 
one must double back to secure connexion—read out 
in that silvery voice of his, which is sweeter than any 
music to my ear, those chapters of the New Testament 
that deal with the birth of the Saviour. And the 
red-faced rustic congregation hung on the good man's 
voice as he spoke of the Infant brought forth in a 
manger, of the shining angels that appeared in mid- 



124 Christmas. 

air to the shepherds, of the miraculous star that took 
its station in the sky, and of the wise men who came 
from afar and laid their gifts of frankincense and 
myrrh at the feet of the child. With the story every 
one was familiar, but on that day, and backed by the 
persuasive melody of the reader's voice, it seemed to 
all quite new — at least, they listened attentively as if it 
were. The discourse that followed possessed no re- 
markable thoughts ; it dealt simply with the goodness 
of the Maker of heaven and earth, and the shortness 
of time, with the duties of thankfulness and charity to 
the poor ; and I am persuaded that every one who 
heard returned to his house in a better frame of mind. 
And so the service remitted us all to our own homes, 
to what roast-beef and plum-pudding slender means 
permitted, to gatherings around cheerful fires, to half- 
pleasant, half-sad remembrances of the dead and the 
absent. 

From sermon I have returned like the others, and 
it is my purpose to hold Christmas alone. I have no 
one with me at table, and my own thoughts must be 
my Christmas guests. Sitting here, it is pleasant to 
think how much kindly feeling exists this present 
night in England. By imagination I can taste of 
every table, pledge every toast, silently join in every 
roar of merriment. I become a sort of universal 
guest. With what propriety is this jovial season 
placed amid dismal December rains and snows ! 
How one pities the unhappy Australians, with whom 



Christmas. 125 

everything is turned topsy-turvy, and who hold Christ- 
mas at midsummer! The face of Christmas glows 
all the brighter for the cold. The heart warms as the 
frost increases. Estrangements which have embit- 
tered the whole year, melt in to-night's hospitable 
smile. There are warmer hand-shakings on this night 
than during the bypast twelve months. Friend lives 
in the mind of friend. There is more charity at this 
time than at any other. You get up at midnight and 
toss your spare coppers to the half-benumbed mu- 
sicians whiffling beneath your windows, although 
at any other time you would consider their per- 
formance a nuisance, and call angrily for the police. 
Poverty, and scanty clothing, and fireless grates, 
come home at this season to the bosoms of the 
rich, and they give of their abundance. The very 
red-breast of the woods enjoys his Christmas feast. 
Good feeling incarnates itself in plum-pudding. The 
Master's words, "The poor ye have always with you," 
wear at this time a deep significance. For at least 
one night on each year over all Christendom there is 
brotherhood. And good men, sitting amongst their 
families, or by a solitary fire like me, when they re- 
member the light that shone over the poor clowns 
huddling on the Bethlehem plains eighteen hundred 
years ago, the apparition of shining angels overhead, 
the song " Peace on earth and goodwill toward men," 
which for the first time hallowed -the midnight air, — 
pray for that strain's fulfilment, that battle and strife 



126 Christmas. 

may vex the nations no more, that not only on 
Christmas-eve, but the whole year round, men shall 
be brethren, owning one Father in heaven. 

Although suggested by the season, and by a soli- 
tary dinner, it is not my purpose to indulge in per- 
sonal reminiscence and talk. Let all that pass. This 
is Christmas-day, the anniversary of the world's great- 
est event. To one day all the early world looked 
forward ; to the same day the later world looks back. 
That day holds time together. Isaiah, standing on 
the peaks of prophecy, looked across ruined empires 
and the desolations of many centuries, and saw on 
the horizon the new star arise, and was glad. On 
this night eighteen hundred years ago, Jove was dis- 
crowned, the Pagan heaven emptied of its divinities, 
and Olympus left to the solitude of its snows. On this 
night, so many hundred years bygone, the despairing 
voice was heard shrieking on the ^Egean, "Pan is 
dead, great Pan is dead !" On this night, according 
to the fine reverence of the poets, all things that blast 
and blight are powerless, disarmed by sweet influ- 
ences : — 

" Some say that ever 'gainst the season comes 
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated 
The bird of dawning singeth all night long ; 
And then they say no spirit dares stir abroad ; 
. The nights are wholesome ; then no planets strike ; 
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm : 
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time." 



Christmas. 127 

The flight of the Pagan mythology before the new- 
faith has been a favourite subject with the poets ; and 
it has been my custom for many seasons to read 
Milton's " Hymn to the Nativity" on the evening of 
Christmas-day. The bass of heaven's deep organ 
seems to blow in the lines, and slowly and with many 
echoes the strain melts into silence. To my ear the 
lines sound like the full-voiced choir and the rolling 
organ of a cathedral, when the afternoon light stream- 
ing through the painted windows fills the place with 
solemn colours and masses of gorgeous gloom. To- 
night I shall float my lonely hours away on music : — 

" The oracles are dumb, 
No voice or hideous hum 
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving : 
Apollo from his shrine 
Can no more divine 
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. 
No nightly trance or breathed spell 
Inspires the pale -eyed priest from the prophetic cell. 

' ' The lonely mountains o'er, 
And the resounding shore, 
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament : 
From haunted spring, and dale 
Edged with poplars pale, 
The parting genius is with sighing sent : 
With flower-enwoven tresses torn 
The nymphs in twilight shades of tangled thickets mourn. 

" Peor and Baalim 

Forsake their temples dim 
With that twice -batter'd god of Palestine ; 



128 Christmas. 

And mooned Ashtaroth, 
Heaven's queen and mother both, 
Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine ! 
The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn, 
In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn. 

" And sullen Molocn, fled, 
Hath left in shadows dread 
His burning idol, all of blackest hue : 
In vain with cymbals' ring 
They call the grisly king 
In dismal dance about the furnace blue : 
The brutish gods of Nile as fast, 
Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis haste. 

" He feels from Juda's land 
The dreaded Infant's hand, 
The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne : 
Nor all the gods beside 
Dare longer there abide, 
Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine. 
Our Babe to shew His Godhead true 
Can hi His swaddling bands control the damned crew." 



These verses, as if loath to die, linger with a cer- 
tain persistence in mind and ear. This is the 
" mighty line" which critics talk about ! And just as 
in an infant's face you may discern the rudiments of 
the future man, so in the glorious hymn may be 
traced the more majestic lineaments of the " Paradise 
Lost." 

Strangely enough, the next noblest dirge for the 
unrealmed divinities which I can call to remembrance, 
and at the same time the most eloquent celebration 



Christmas. 129 

of the new power and prophecy of its triumph, has 
been uttered by Shelley, who cannot in any sense be 
termed a Christian poet. It is one of the choruses in 
" Hellas," and perhaps had he lived longer amongst 
us, it would have been the prelude to higher strains. 
Of this I am certain, that before his death the mind 
of that brilliant genius was rapidly changing, — that 
for him the cross was gathering attractions round 
it, — that the wall which he complained had been 
built up between his heart and his intellect was being 
broken down, and that rays of a strange splendour 
were already streaming upon him through the in- 
terstices. What a contrast between the darkened 
glory of " Queen Mab " — of which in after-life he was 
ashamed, both as a literary work and as an expression 
of opinion — and the intense, clear, lyrical light of this 
triumphant poem ! — 

" A power from the unknown God, 
A Promethean conqueror came : 
Like a triumphal path he trod 
The thorns of death and shame. 

A mortal shape to him 

Was like the vapour dim 
Which the orient planet animates with light. 

Hell, sin, and slavery came 

Like bloodhounds mild and tame, 
Nor prey'd until their lord had taken flight. 

The moon of Mahomet 

Arose, and it shall set ; 
While blazon'd, as on heaven's immortal noon, 

The Cross leads generations on. 
I 



130 Christmas. 

" Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep, 
From one whose dreams are paradise, 
Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep, 
And day peers forth with her blank eyes : 

So fleet, so faint, so fair, 

The powers of earth and air 
Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem. 

Apollo, Pan, and Love, 

And even Olympian Jove, 
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them* 

Our hills, and seas, and streams, 

Dispeopled of their dreams, 
Their waters turn'd to blood, their dew to tears, 

Wail'd for the golden years." 

For my own part, I cannot read these lines without 
emotion — not so much for their beauty as for the 
change in the writer's mind which they suggest. The 
self-sacrifice which lies at the centre of Christianity 
should have touched this man more deeply than 
almost any other. That it was beginning to touch 
and mould him, I verily believe. He died and made 
that sign. Of what music did that storm in Spezia 
Bay rob the world ! 

" The Cross leads generations on." Believing as I 
do that my own personal decease is not more certain 
than that our religion will subdue the world, I own 
that it is with a somewhat saddened heart that I 
pass my thoughts around the globe, and consider 
how distant is yet that triumph. There are the 
realms on which the crescent beams, the monstrous 
many-headed gods of India, the Chinaman's heathen- 
ism, the African's devil-rites. These are, to a large 



Christmas. 1 3 1 

extent, principalities and powers of darkness with 
which our religion has never been brought into 
collision, save at trivial and far separated points, 
and in these cases the attack has never been made 
in strength. But what of our own Europe — the home 
of philosophy, of poetry, and painting? Europe, 
which has produced Greece, and Rome, and Eng- 
land's centuries of glory ; which has been illumined 
by the fires of martyrdom ; which has heard a Luther 
preach ; which has listened to Dante's " mystic un- 
fathomable song ;" to which Milton has opened the 
door of heaven — what of it % And what, too, of that 
younger America, starting in its career with all our 
good things, and enfranchised of many of our evils'? 
Did not the December sun now shining look down 
on thousands slaughtered at Fredricksburg, in a 
most mad, most incomprehensible quarrel? And is 
not the public air which European nations breathe 
at this moment, as it has been for several years 
back, charged with thunder 1 ? Despots are plotting, 
ships are building, man's ingenuity is bent, as it 
never was bent before, on the invention and im- 
provement of instruments of death ; Europe is brist- 
ling with five millions of bayonets : and this is the 
condition of a world for which the Son of God died 
eighteen hundred and sixty-two years ago ! There 
is no mystery of Providence so inscrutable as this ; 
and yet, is not the very sense of its mournfulness a 
proof that the spirit of Christianity is living in the 



132 Christmas. 

minds of men 1 For, of a verity, military glory is be- 
coming in our best thoughts a bloody rag, and con- 
quest the first in the catalogue of mighty crimes, and a 
throned tyrant, with armies, and treasures, and the cheers 
of millions rising up like a cloud of incense around 
him, but a mark for the thunderbolt of Almighty God 
— in reality poorer than Lazarus stretched at the gate 
of Dives. Besides, all these things are getting them- 
selves to some extent mitigated. Florence Nightin- 
gale — for the first time in the history of the world — 
walks through the Scutari hospitals, and " poor, noble, 
wounded, and sick men," to use her Majesty's tender 
phrases, kiss her shadow as it falls on them. The 
Emperor Napoleon does not make war to employ 
his armies, or to consolidate his power ; he does so 
for the sake of an " idea " more or less generous and 
disinterested. The soul of mankind would revolt at 
the blunt, naked truth ; and the taciturn emperor 
knows this, as he knows most things. This imperial 
hypocrisy, like every other hypocrisy, is a homage 
which vice pays to virtue. There cannot be a doubt 
that when the political crimes of kings and govern- 
ments, the sores that fester in the heart of society, 
and all "the burden of the unintelligible world," 
weigh heaviest on the mind, we have to thank Chris- 
tianity for it. That pure light makes visible the dark- 
ness. The Sermon on the Mount makes the morality 
of the nations ghastly. The Divine love makes 
human hate stand out in dark relief. This sadness, 



Christmas. 133 

in the essence of it nobler than any joy, is the heritage 
of the Christian. An ancient Roman could not have 
felt so. Everything runs on smoothly enough so long 
as Jove wields the thunder. But Venus, Mars, and 
Minerva are far behind us now ; the cross is before 
us ; and self-denial and sorrow for sin, and the remem- 
brance of the poor, and the cleansing of our own 
hearts, are duties incumbent upon every one of us. 
If the Christian is less happy than the Pagan, and at 
times I think he is so, it arises from the reproach of 
the Christian's unreached ideal, and from the stings 
of his finer and more scrupulous conscience. His 
whole moral organisation is finer, and he must pay 
the noble penalty of finer organisations. 

Once again, for the purpose of taking away all 
solitariness of feeling, and of connecting myself, albeit 
only in fancy, with the proper gladness of the time, 
let me think of the comfortable family dinners now 
being drawn to a close, of the good wishes uttered, 
and the presents made, quite valueless in themselves, 
yet felt to be invaluable from the feelings from which 
they spring; of the little children, by sweetmeats 
lapped in Elysium; and of the pantomime, pleasantest 
Christmas sight of all, with the pit a sea of grinning 
delight, the boxes a tier of beaming juvenility, the 
galleries, piled up to the far-receding roof, a mass of 
happy laughter which a clown's joke brings down in 
mighty avalanches. In the pit, sober people relax 
themselves, and suck oranges, and quaff ginger-pop ; 



1 34 Christmas. 

in the boxes, Miss, gazing through her curls, thinks the 
Fairy Prince the prettiest creature she ever beheld, 
and Master, that to be a clown must be the pinnacle 
of human happiness ; while up in the galleries the 
hard literal world is for an hour sponged out and 
obliterated ; the chimney-sweep forgets, in his de- 
light when the policeman comes to grief, the harsh 
call of his master, and Cinderella, when the demons 
are foiled, and the long-parted lovers meet and em- 
brace in a paradise of light and pink gauze, the 
grates that must be scrubbed to-morrow. All bands 
and trappings of toil are for one hour loosened 
by the hands of imaginative sympathy. What hap- 
piness a single theatre can contain ! And those of 
maturer years, or of more meditative temperament, 
sitting at the pantomime, can extract out of the shift- 
ing scenes meanings suitable to themselves ; for the 
pantomime is a symbol or adumbration of human 
life. Have we not all known Harlequin, who rules 
the roast, and has the pretty Columbine to him- 
ssin Do we not all know that rogue of a clown 
with his peculating fingers, who brazens out of every 
scrape, and who conquers the world by good humour 
and ready wit 1 And have we not seen Pantaloons 
not a few, whose fate it is to get all the kicks and 
lose all the halfpence, to fall through all the trap 
doors, break their shins over all the barrows, and be 
for ever captured by the policeman, while the true 
pilferer, the clown, makes his escape with the booty 



Christmas. 135 

in his possession % Methinks I know the realities of 
which these things are but the shadows ; have met 
with them in business, have sat with them at dinner. 
But to-night no such notions as these intrude; and 
when the torrent of fun, and transformation, and 
practical joking which rushed out of the beautiful 
fairy world, is in the beautiful fairy world gathered 
up again, the high-heaped happiness of the theatre 
will disperse itself, and the Christmas pantomime 
will be a pleasant memory the whole year through. 
Thousands on thousands of people are having their 
midriffs tickled at this moment ; in fancy I see their 
lighted faces, in memory I hear their mirth. 

By this time I should think every Christmas dinner 
at Dreamthorp or elsewhere has come to an end. 
Even now in the great cities the theatres will be dis- 
persing. The clown has wiped the paint off his face. 
Harlequin has laid aside his wand, and divested him- 
self of his glittering raiment ; Pantaloon, after refresh- 
ing himself with a pint of porter, is rubbing his aching 
joints ; and Columbine, wrapped up in a shawl, and 
with sleepy eyelids, has gone home in a cab. Soon, 
in the great theatre, the lights will be put out, and the 
empty stage will be left to ghosts. Hark ! midnight 
from the church tower vibrates through the frosty air. 
I look out on the brilliant heaven, and see a milky 
way of powdery splendour wandering through it, 
and clusters and knots of stars and planets shining 
serenely in the blue frosty spaces; and the armed 



136 Christmas. 

apparition of Orion, his spear pointing away into 
immeasurable space, gleaming overhead; and the 
familiar constellation of the Plough dipping down 
into the west ; and I think when I go in again that 
there is one Christmas the less between me and my 
grave. 



MEN OF LETTERS. 

IV/FR HAZLITT has written many pleasant essays, 
but none pleasanter than that entitled "My 
First Acquaintance with Poets/' which, in the edition 
edited by his son, opens the Wintersloe series. It re- 
lates almost entirely to Coleridge ; containing sketches 
of his personal appearance, fragments of his conver- 
sation, and is filled with a young man's generous 
enthusiasm, belief, admiration, as with sunrise. He 
had met Coleridge, walked with him, talked with him, 
and the high intellectual experience not only made 
him better acquainted with his own spirit and its 
folded powers, but — as is ever the case with such 
spiritual encounters — it touched and illuminated the 
dead outer world. The road between Wem and 
Shrewsbury was familiar enough to Hazlitt, but as the 
twain passed along it on that winter day, it became 
etherialised, poetic — wonderful, as if leading across 
the Delectable Mountains to the Golden City, whose 
gleam is discernible on the horizon. The milestones 
were mute with attention, the pines upon the hill had 
ears for the stranger as he passed. Eloquence made 



138 Men of Letters. 

the red leaves rustle on the oak ; made the depth of 
heaven seem as if swept by a breath of spring ; and 
when the evening star appeared, Hazlitt saw it as 
Adam did while in Paradise and but one day old. 
" As we passed along," writes the essayist, " between 
Wem and Shrewsbury, and I eyed the blue hill tops 
seen through the wintry branches, or the red, rustling 
leaves of the sturdy oak-trees by the wayside, a sound 
was in my ears as of a syren's song. I was stunned, 
startled with it as from deep sleep ; but I had no 
notion that I should ever be able to express my ad- 
miration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, 
till the light of his genius shone into my soul, like the 
sun's rays glittering in the puddles of the road. I 
was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a 
worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless ; but 
now, bursting from the deadly bands that bound them, 
my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand 
their plumes, catch the golden light of other years. 
My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, 
dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; 
my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, 
has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak 
to ; but that my understanding also did not remain 
dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to 
express itself, I owe to Coleridge." Time and sorrow, 
personal ambition thwarted and fruitlessly driven back 
on itself, hopes for the world defeated and unrealised, 
changed the enthusiastic youth into a petulant, unsocial 



Men of Letters. 139 

man; yet ever as he remembered that meeting and 
his wintry walk from Wem to Shrewsbury the early 
glow came back, and again a " sound was in his ears 
as of a syren's song." 

. We are not all hero-worshippers like Hazlitt, but 
most of us are so to a large extent. A large propor- 
tion of mankind feel a quite peculiar interest in famous 
writers. They like to read about them, to know what 
they said on this or the other occasion, what sort of 
house they inhabited, what fashion of dress they wore, 
if they liked any particular dish for dinner, what kind 
of women they fell in love with, and whether their 
domestic atmosphere was stormy or the reverse. 
Concerning such men no bit of information is too 
trifling; everything helps to make out the mental 
image we have dimly formed for ourselves. And this 
kind of interest is heightened by the artistic way in 
which time occasionally groups them. The race is 
gregarious, they are visible to us in clumps like prim- 
roses, they are brought into neighbourhood and flash 
light on each other like gems in a diadem. We 
think of the wild geniuses who came up from the 
universities to London in the dawn of the English 
drama. Greene, Nash, Marlowe — our first profes- 
sional men of letters — how they cracked their satirical 
whips, how they brawled in taverns, how pinched 
they were at times, how, when they possessed money, 
they flung it from them as if it were poison, with what 
fierce speed they wrote, how they shook the stage. 



140 Men of Letters. 

Then we think of the " Mermaid " in session, with 
Shakspeare's bland, oval face, the light of a smile 
spread over it, and Ben Johnson's truculent visage, 
and Beaumont and Fletcher sitting together in their 
beautiful friendship, and fancy as best we can the 
drollery, the repartee, the sage sentences, the light- 
ning gleams of wit, the thunder-peals of laughter. 

" What things have we seen 
Done at the Mermaid ? Heard words that hath been 
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame, 
As if that every one from whence they came 
Had meant to put his whole soul in a jest, 
And had resolved to live a fool the rest 
Of his dull life." 

Then there is the " Literary Club," with Johnson, and 
Garrick, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Goldsmith 
sitting in perpetuity in Boswell. The Doctor has been 
talking there for a hundred years, and there will he 
talk for many a hundred more. And we of another 
generation, and with other things to think about, can 
enter any night we please, and hear what is going on. 
Then we have the swarthy ploughman from Ayrshire 
sitting at Lord Monboddo's with Dr Blair, Dugald 
Stewart, Henry Mackenzie, and the rest. These went 
into the presence of the wonderful rustic thoughtlessly 
enough, and now they cannot return even if they 
would. They are defrauded of oblivion. Not yet 
have they tasted forgetfulness and the grave. The 
day may come when Burns shall be forgotten, but till 



Men of Letters. 141 

that day arrives — and the eastern sky as yet gives no 
token of its approach — him they must attend as sate- 
lites the sun, as courtiers their king. Then there are 
the Lakers, — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, De 
Quincey burdened with his tremendous dream, Wilson 
in his splendid youth. What talk, what argument, 
what readings of lyrical and other ballads, what con- 
tempt of critics, what a hail of fine ^things ! Then 
there is Charles Lamb's room in Inner Temple Lane, 
the hush of a whist table in one corner, the host 
stuttering puns as he deals the cards ; and sitting 
round about, Hunt, whose every sentence is flavoured 
with the hawthorn and the primrose, and Hazlitt 
maddened by Waterloo and St Helena, and Godwin 
with his wild theories, and Kemble with his Roman 
look. And before the morning comes, and Lamb 
stutters yet more thickly — for there is a slight flavour 
of punch in the apartment — what talk there has been 
of Hogarth's prints, of Isaac Walton, of the old dra- 
matists, of Sir Thomas Browne's " Urn Burial," with 
Elia's quaint humour breaking through every in- 
terstice, and flowering in every fissure and cranny 
of the conversation ! One likes to think of these 
social gatherings of wits and geniuses ; they are more 
interesting than conclaves of kings or convocations of 
bishops. One would like to have been the waiter 
at the " Mermaid," and to have stood behind Shak- 
speare's chair. What was that functionary's opinion 
of his guests 1 Did he listen and become witty by 



142 Men of Letters. 

infection 1 ? or did he, when his task was over, retire 
unconcernedly to chalk up the tavern score? One 
envies somewhat the damsel who brought Lamb the 
spirit-case and the hot water. I think of these meet- 
ings, and, in lack of companionship, frame for myself 
imaginary conversations — not so brilliant, of course, 
as Mr Landor's, but yet sufficient to make pleasant 
for me the twilight hour while the lamp is yet unlit, 
and my solitary room is filled with the ruddy lights 
and shadows of the fire. 

Of human notabilities men of letters are the most 
interesting, and this arises mainly from there out- 
spokenness as a class. The writer makes himself 
known in a way that no other man makes himself 
known. The distinguished engineer may be as great 
a man as the distinguished writer, but as a rule we 
know little about him. We see him invent a locomo- 
tive, or bridge a strait, but there our knowledge stops ; 
we look at the engine, we walk across the bridge, we 
admire the ingenuity of the one, we are grateful for 
the conveniency of the other, but to our apprehen- 
sions the engineer is undeciphered all the while. 
Doubtless he reveals himself in his work as the poet 
reveals himself in his song, but then this revelation is 
made in a tongue unknown to the majority. After all, 
we do not feel that we get nearer him. The man of 
letters, on the other hand, is outspoken, he takes you 
into his confidence, he keeps no secret from you. Be 
you beggar, be you king, you are welcome. He is no 



Men of Letters. 143 

respecter of persons. He gives without reserve his 
fancies, his wit, his wisdom ; he makes you a present 
of all that the painful or the happy years have brought 
him. The writer makes his reader heir in full. Men 
of letters are a peculiar class. They are never com- 
monplace or prosaic — at least those of them that 
mankind care for. They are airy, wise, gloomy, me- 
lodious spirits. They give us the language we speak, 
they furnish the subjects of our best talk. They are 
full of generous impulses and sentiments, and keep 
the world young. They have said fine things on every 
phase of human experience. The air is full of their 
voices. Their books are the world's holiday and 
playground, and into these neither care, nor the 
dun, nor despondency can follow the enfranchised 
man. Men of letters forerun science as the morn- 
ing star the dawn. Nothing has been invented, 
nothing has been achieved, but has gleamed a bright- 
coloured Utopia in the eyes of one or the other 
of these men. Several centuries before the Great 
Exhibition of 185 1 rose in Hyde Park, a wondrous 
hall of glass stood, radiant in sunlight, in the verse of 
Chaucer. The electric telegraph is not so swift as the 
flight of Puck. We have not yet realised the hippo- 
griff of Ariosto. Just consider what a world this 
would be if ruled by the best thoughts of men of 
letters ! Ignorance would die at once, war would 
cease, taxation would be lightened, not only every 
Frenchman, but every man in the world, would have 



144 Men of Letters. 

his hen in the pot. May would not marry January. 
The race of lawyers and physicians would be extinct. 
Fancy a world, the affairs of which are directed by 
Goethe's wisdom and Goldsmith's heart ! In such a 
case methinks the millennium were already come. 
Books are a finer world within the world. With 
books are connected all my desires and aspirations. 
When I go to my long sleep, on a book will my head 
be pillowed. I care for no other fashion of greatness. 
I 'd as lief not be remembered at all as remembered 
in connection with anything else. I would rather be 
Charles Lamb than Charles XII. I would rather be re- 
membered by a song than by a victory. I would rather 
build a fine sonnet than have built St Paul's. I would 
rather be the discoverer of a new image than the dis- 
coverer of a new planet. Fine phrases I value more 
than bank-notes. I have ear for no other harmony 
than the harmony of words. To be occasionally 
quoted is the only fame I care for. 

But what of the literary life ? How fares it with 
the men whose days and nights are devoted to the 
writing of books % We know the famous men of let- 
ters, we give them the highest place in our regards ; 
we crown them with laurels so thickly that we hide 
the furrows on their foreheads. Yet we must remem- 
ber that there are men of letters who have been 
equally sanguine, equally ardent, who have pursued 
perfection equally unselfishly, but who have failed to 
make themselves famous. We know the ships that 



Men of Letters. 145 

come with streaming pennons into the immortal 
ports ; we know but little of the ships that have 
gone on fire on the way thither, — that have gone 
down at sea. Even with successful men we cannot 
know precisely how matters have gone. We read the 
fine raptures of the poet, but we do not know into 
what kind of being he relapses when the inspiration is 
over, any more than, seeing and hearing the lark shrill- 
ing at the gate of heaven, we know with what effort 
it has climbed thither, or into what kind of nest it 
must descend. The lark is not always singing; no 
more is the poet. The lark is only interesting while 
singing, at other times it is but a plain brown bird. 
We may not be able to recognise the poet when he 
doffs his singing robes ; he may then sink to the level 
of his admirers. We laugh at the fancies of the 
humorist, but he may have written his brilliant 
things in a dismal enough mood. The writer is not 
continually dwelling amongst the roses and lilies of 
life, he is not continually uttering generous sentiments, 
and saying fine things. On him, as on his brethren, 
the world presses with its prosaic needs. He has to 
make love and marry, and run the usual matrimonial 
risks. The income-tax collector visits him as well as 
others. Around his head at Christmas-times drives a 
snow-storm of bills. He must keep the wolf from the 
door, and he has only his goose-quills to confront it 
with. And here it is,- having to deal with alien powers, 
that his special temperament comes into play, and may 



146 Men of Letters. 

work him evil. Wit is not worldly wisdom. A man 
gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the 
puddles on the road. A man may be able to disen- 
tangle intricate problems, be able to recall the past, 
and yet be cozened by an ordinary knave. The finest 
expression will not liquidate a butcher's account. If 
Apollo puts his name to a bill, he must meet it when 
it becomes due, or go into the gazette. Armies are 
not always cheering on the heights which they have 
won ; there are forced marches, occasional shortness 
of provisions, bivouacs on muddy plains, driving in of 
pickets, and the like, although these inglorious items 
are forgotten when w T e read the roll of victories in- 
scribed on their banners. The books of the great 
writer are only portions of the great writer. His life 
acts on his writings ; his writings react on his life. 
His life may impoverish his books; his books may 
impoverish his life. 

"Apollo's branch that might have grown full straight," 

may have the worm of a vulgar misery gnawing at 
its roots. The heat of inspiration may be subtracted 
from the household fire ; and those who sit by it may 
be the colder in consequence. A man may put all 
his good things in his books, and leave none for 
his life, just as a man may expend his fortune 
on a splendid dress, and carry a pang of hunger 
beneath it. 

There are few less exhilarating books than the bio- 



Men of Letters. 147 

graphies of men of letters, and of artists generally ; 
and this arises from the pictures of comparative de- 
feat which, in almost every instance, such books con- 
tain. In these books we see failure more or less, — 
seldom clear, victorious effort. If the art is exquisite, 
the marble is flawed ; if the marble is pure, there is 
defect in art. There is always something lacking in 
the poem ; there is always irremediable defect in the 
picture. In the biography we see persistent, passion- 
ate effort, and almost constant repulse. If, on the 
whole, victory is gained, one wing of the army has 
been thrown into confusion. In the life of a success- 
ful farmer, for instance, one feels nothing of this 
kind; his year flows on harmoniously, fortunately: 
through ploughing, seed-time, growth of grain, the 
yellowing of it beneath meek autumn suns and big 
autumn moons, the cutting of it down, riotous harvest- 
home, final sale, and large balance at the banker's. 
From the point of view of almost unvarying success 
the farmer's life becomes beautiful, poetic. Everything 
is an aid and help to him. Nature puts her shoulder 
to his wheel. He takes the winds, the clouds, the sun- 
beams, the rolling stars into partnership, and, asking 
no dividend, they let him retain the entire profits. As 
a rule, the lives of men of letters do not flow on in this 
successful way. In their case there is always either 
defect in the soil or defect in the husbandry. Like 
the Old Guard at Waterloo, they are fighting bravely 
on a lost field. In literary biography there is always. 



148 Men of Letters. 

an element of tragedy, and the love we bear the dead is 
mingled with pity. Of course the life of a man of 
letters is more perilous than the life of a farmer; 
more perilous than almost any other kind of life which 
it is given a human being to conduct. It is more 
difficult to obtain the mastery over spiritual ways and 
means than over material ones, and he must com- 
mand both. Properly to conduct his life he must not 
only take large crops off his fields, he must also leave 
in his fields the capacity of producing large crops. It 
is easy to drive in your chariot two horses of one 
breed; not so easy when the one is of terrestrial 
stock, the other of celestial ; in every respect differ- 
ent — in colour, temper, and pace. 

At the outset of his career, the man of letters is 
confronted by the fact that he must live. The obtain- 
ing of a livelihood is preliminary to everything else. 
Poets and cobblers are placed on the same level so 
far. If the writer can barter MSS. for sufficient coin, 
he may proceed to develop himself; if he cannot so 
barter it, there is a speedy end of himself, and of his 
development also. Literature has become a profes- 
sion ; but it is in several respects different from the 
professions by which other human beings earn their 
bread. The man of letters, unlike the clergyman, the 
physician, or the lawyer, has to undergo no special 
preliminary training for his work, and while engaged 
in it, unlike the professional persons named, he has 
no accredited status. Of course, to earn any sue- 



Men of Letters, 149 

cess, he must start with as much special knowledge, 
with as much dexterity in his craft, as your ordinary 
physician; but then he is not recognised till once 
he is successful. When a man takes a physician's de- 
gree, he has done something ; when a man betakes 
himself to literary pursuits, he has done nothing — till 
once he is lucky enough to make his mark. There is 
no special preliminary training for men of letters, 
and, as a consequence, their ranks are recruited from 
the vagrant talent of the world. Men that break 
loose from the professions, who stray from the 
beaten tracks of life, take refuge in literature. In 
it are to be found doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and 
the motley nation of Bohemians. Any one possessed 
of a nimble brain, a quire of paper, a steel-pen and 
ink-bottle, can start business. Any one who chooses 
may enter the lists, and no questions are asked 
concerning his antecedents. The battle is won by 
sheer strength of brain. From all this it comes that 
the man of letters has usually a history of his own : 
his individuality is more pronounced than the indi- 
viduality of other men ; he has been knocked about by 
passion and circumstance. All his life he has had a 
dislike for iron rules and common-place maxims. 
There is something of the gipsy in his nature. He is 
to some extent eccentric, and he indulges his eccen- 
tricity. And the misfortunes of men of letters — the 
vulgar and patent misfortunes, I mean — arise mainly 
from the want of harmony between their impulsive- 



1 5 o Men of L etters. 

ness and volatility, and the staid unmercurial world 
with which they are brought into conflict. They are 
unconventional in a world of conventions ; they are 
fanciful, and are constantly misunderstood in prosaic 
relations. They are wise enough in their books, for 
there they are sovereigns, and can shape everything to 
their own likings ; out of their books, they are not 
unfrequently extremely foolish, for they exist then in 
the territory of an alien power, and are constantly 
knocking their heads against existing orders of things. 
Men of letters take prosaic men out of themselves ; 
but they are weak where the prosaic men are 
strong. They have their own way in the world of 
ideas, prosaic men in the world of facts. From his 
practical errors the writer learns something, if not 
always humility and amendment. A memorial flower 
grows on every spot where he has come to grief; and 
the chasm he cannot over-leap he bridges with a rain- 
bow. 

But the man of letters has not only to live, he has to 
develop himself; and his earning of money and his in- 
tellectual development should proceed simultaneously 
and in proportionate degrees. Herein lies the main 
difficulty of the literary Hfe. Out of his thought the 
man must bring fire, food, clothing; and fire, food, 
clothing must in their turns subserve thought. It is 
necessary, for the proper conduct of such a life, that 
while the balance at the banker's increases, intellectual 
resource should increase at the same ratio. Progress 



Men of Letters. 151 

should not be made in the faculty of expression alone, 
— progress at the same time should be made in thought ; 
for thought is the material on which expression feeds. 
Should sufficient advance not be made in this last 
direction, in a short time the man feels that he has 
expressed himself, — that now he can only more or 
less dexterously repeat himself, — more or less prettily 
become his own echo. It is comparatively easy to 
acquire facility in writing ; but it is an evil thing for 
the man of letters when such facility is the only thing 
he has acquired, — when it has been, perhaps, the only 
thing he has striven to acquire. Such miscalculation 
of ways and means suggests vulgarity of aspiration, 
and a fatal material taint. In the life in which this 
error has been committed there can be no proper 
harmony, no satisfaction, no spontaneous delight in 
effort. The man does not create, — he is only desper- 
ately keeping up appearances. He has at once become 
" a base mechanical," and his successes are not much 
higher than the successes of the acrobat or the rope- 
dancer. This want of proper relationship between 
resources of expression and resources of thought, or 
subject-matter for expression, is common enough, and 
some slight suspicion of it flashes across the mind at 
times in reading even the best authors. It lies at the 
bottom of every catastrophe in the literary life, Fre- 
quently a man's first book is good, and all his after 
productions but faint and yet fainter reverberations of 
the first. The men who act thus are in the long run 



1 5 2 Men of L e iters. 

deserted like worked-out mines. A man reaches his 
limits as to thought long before he reaches his limits as 
to expression ; and a haunting suspicion of this is one 
of the peculiar bitters of the literary life. Hazlitt tells 
us that, after one of his early interviews with Coleridge, 
he sat down to his Essay on the Natural Disinterested- 
ness of the Human Mind. (t I sat down to the task 
shortly afterwards for the twentieth time, got new pens 
and paper, determined to make clean work of it, wrote 
a few sentences in the skeleton style of a mathematical 
demonstration, stopped half-way down the second 
page, and, after trying in vain to pump up any words, 
images, notions, apprehensions, facts, or observations, 
from that gulf of abstraction in which I had plunged 
myself for four or five years preceding, gave up the 
attempt as labour in vain, and shed tears of hopeless 
despondency on the blank unfinished paper. I can 
write fast enough now. Am I better than I was then ? 
oh no ! One truth discovered, one pang of regret at 
not being able to express it, is worth all the fluency 
and flippancy in the world." This regretful looking 
back to the past, when emotions were keen and sharp, 
and when thought wore the novel dress of a stranger, 
and this dissatisfaction with the acquirements of the 
present, is common enough with the man of letters. 
The years have come and gone, and he is conscious 
that he is not intrinsically richer, — he has only learn- 
ed to assort and display his riches to advantage. 
His wares have neither increased in quantity nor 



Men of Letters, 153 

improved in quality, — he has only procured a win- 
dow in a leading thoroughfare. He can catch his 
butterflies more cunningly, he can pin them on his 
cards more skilfully, but their wings are fingered 
and tawdry compared with the time when they win- 
nowed before him in the sunshine over the meadows 
of youth. This species of regret is peculiar to the 
class of which I am speaking, and they often discern 
failure in what the world counts success. The veteran 
does not look back to the time when he was in the 
awkward squad; the accountant does not sigh over 
the time when he was bewildered by the mysteries of 
double -entry. And the reason is obvious. The 
dexterity which time and practice have brought to the 
soldier and the accountant is pure gain : the dexterity 
of expression which time and practice have brought 
to the writer is gain too, in its way, but not quite so 
pure. It may have been cultivated and brought to 
its degree of excellence at the expense of higher things. 
The man of letters lives by thought and expression, 
and his two powers may not be perfectly balanced. 
And, putting aside its effect on the reader, and through 
that, on the writer's pecuniary prosperity, the tragedy 
of want of equipoise lies in this. When the writer 
expresses his thought, it is immediately dead to him, 
however life-giving it may be to others; he pauses 
midway in his career, he looks back over his uttered 
past — brown desert to him, in which there is no sus- 
tenance — he looks forward to the green muttered 



154 Men of Letters. 

future, and beholding its narrow limits, knows it is all 
that he can call his own, — on that vivid strip he must 
pasture his intellectual life. 

Is the literary life, on the whole, a happy one? 
Granted that the writer is productive, that he possesses 
abundance of material, that he has secured the ear of 
the world, one is inclined to fancy that no life could 
be happier. Such a man seems to live on the finest 
of the wheat. If a poet, he is continually singing ; if 
a novelist, he is supreme in his ideal world; if a 
humorist, everything smiles back upon his smile \ if 
an essayist, he is continually saying the wisest, most 
memorable things. He breathes habitually the serener 
air which ordinary mortals can only at intervals re- 
spire, and in their happiest moments. Such concep- 
tions of great writers are to some extent erroneous. 
Through the medium of their books we know them 
only in their active mental states, — in their triumphs ; 
we do not see them when sluggishness has succeeded 
the effort which was delight. The statue does not 
come to her white limbs all at once. It is the bronze 
wrestler, not the flesh and blood one, that stands for 
ever over a fallen adversary with the pride of victory 
on his face. Of the labour, the weariness, the self- 
distrust, the utter despondency of the great writer, we 
know nothing. Then, for the attainment of mere 
happiness or contentment, any high faculty of imagi- 
nation is a questionable help. Of course imagination 
lights the torch of joy, it deepens the carmine on the 



Men of Letters. 155 

sleek cheek of the girl, it makes wine sparkle, makes 
music speak, gives rays to the rising sun. But in all 
its supreme sweetnesses there is a perilous admixture of 
deceit, which is suspected even at the moment when 
the senses tingle keenliest. And it must be remem- 
bered that this potent faculty can darken as well as 
brighten. It is the very soul of pain. While the 
trumpets are blowing in Ambition's ear, it whispers 
of the grave. It drapes Death in austere solem- 
nities, and surrounds him with a gloomy court of 
terrors. The life of the imaginative man is never a 
commonplace one : his lights are brighter, his glooms 
are darker, than the lights and glooms of the vulgar. 
His ecstasies are as restless as his pains. The great 
writer has this perilous faculty in excess ; and through 
it he will, as a matter of course, draw out of the 
atmosphere of circumstance surrounding him the 
keenness of pleasure and pain. To my own notion, 
the best gifts of the gods are neither the most glitter- 
ing nor the most admired. These gifts I take to be, 
a moderate ambition, a taste for repose with circum- 
stances favourable thereto, a certain mildness of 
passion, an even-beating pulse, an even-beating heart. 
I do not consider heroes and celebrated persons the 
happiest of mankind. I do not envy Alexander the 
shouting of his armies, nor Dante his laurel wreath. 
Even were I able, I would not purchase these at the 
prices the poet and the warrior paid. So far, then, 
as great writers — great poets, especially — are of ima- 



156 Men of L etters. 

gination all compact — a peculiarity of mental constitu- 
tion which makes a man go shares with every one he 
is brought into contact with ; which makes him enter 
into Romeo's rapture when he touches Juliet's cheek 
among cypresses silvered by the Verona moonlight, 
and the stupor of the blinded and pinioned wretch on 
the scaffold before the bolt is drawn — so far as this 
special gift goes, I do not think the great poet, — and 
by virtue of it he is a poet, — is likely to be happier 
than your more ordinary mortal. On the whole, per- 
haps, it is the great readers rather than the great 
writers who are entirely to be envied. They pluck 
the fruits, and are spared the trouble of rearing them. 
Prometheus filched fire from heaven, and had for 
reward the crag of Caucasus, the chain, the vulture ; 
while they for whom he stole it cook their suppers 
upon it, stretch out benumbed hands towards it, and 
see its light reflected in their children's faces. They 
are comfortable : he, roofed by the keen crystals of 
the stars, groans above. 

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of 
mortal life. The majority of men slip into their 
graves without having encountered on their way 
thither any signal catastrophe or exaltation of fortune 
or feeling. Collect a thousand ignited sticks into a 
heap, and you have a bonfire which may be seen 
over three counties. If, during thirty years, the an- 
noyances connected with shirt-buttons found missing 
when you are hurriedly dressing for dinner, were 



Men of L e tiers. 157 

gathered into a mass and endured at once, it would 
be misery equal to a public execution. If, from the 
same space of time, all the little titillations of a man's 
vanity were gathered into one lump of honey and 
enjoyed at once, the pleasure of being crowned 
would not perhaps be much greater. If the equanim- 
ity of an ordinary man be at the mercy of trifles, 
how much more will the equanimity of the man of 
letters, who is usually the most sensitive of the race, 
and whose peculiar avocation makes sad work with 
the fine tissues of the nerves. Literary composition 
is, I take it, with the exception of the crank, in which 
there is neither hope nor result, the most exhausting 
to which a human being can apply himself. Just con- 
sider the situation. Here is your man of letters, 
tender-hearted as Cowper, who would not count upon 
his list of friends the man who tramples heedlessly 
upon a worm ; as light of sleep and abhorrent of noise 
as Beattie, who denounces chanticleer for his lusty 
proclamation of morning to his own and the neigh- 
bouring farmyards in terms that would be unmeasured 
if applied to Nero ; as alive to blame as Byron, who 
declared that the praise of the greatest of the race 
could not take the sting from the censure of the 
meanest. Fancy the sufferings of a creature so built 
and strung in a world which creaks so vilely on its 
hinges as this ! Will such a man confront a dun with 
an imperturbable countenance 1 Will he throw him- 
self back in his chair and smile blandly when his 



158 Men of Letters. 

chamber is lanced through and through by the notes 
of a street bagpiper % When his harassed brain should 
be solaced by music, will he listen patiently to stupid 
remarks'? I fear not. The man of letters suffers 
keenlier than people suspect from sharp, cruel noises, 
from witless observations, from social misconceptions 
of him of every kind, from hard utilitarian wisdom, 
and from his own good things going to the grave 
unrecognised and unhonoured. And, forced to live 
by his pen, to extract from his brain bread and beer, 
clothing, lodging, and income-tax, I am not sur- 
prised that he is oftentimes nervous, querulous, im- 
patient. Thinking of these things, I do not wonder 
at Hazlitt's spleen, at Charles Lamb's punch, at 
Coleridge's opium. I think of the days spent in 
writing, and of the nights which repeat the day in 
dream, and in which there is no refreshment. I think 
of the brain which must be worked out at length : of 
Scott, when the wand of the enchanter was broken, 
writing poor romances; of Southey sitting vacantly in 
his library, and drawing a feeble satisfaction from the 
faces of his books. And for the man of letters there is 
more than the mere labour : he writes his book, and 
has frequently the mortification of seeing it neglected 
or torn to pieces. Above all men, he longs for sym- 
pathy, recognition, applause. He respects his fellow- 
creature, because he beholds in him a possible reader. 
To write a book, to send it forth to the world and the 
critics, is to a sensitive person like plunging mother 






Men of Letters. 159 

naked into tropic waters where sharks abound. It is 
true that, like death, the terror of criticism lives most 
in apprehension; still, to have been frequently criti- 
cised, and to be constantly liable to it, are disagreeable 
items in a man's life. Most men endure criticism with 
commendable fortitude, just as most criminals when 
under the drop conduct themselves with calmness. 
They bleed, but they bleed inwardly. To be flayed 
in the Saturday Review, for instance, — a whole amused 
public looking on, — is far from pleasant ; and, after the 
operation, the ordinary annoyances of life probably 
magnify themselves into tortures. The grasshopper 
becomes a burden. Touch a flayed man ever so 
lightly, and with ever so kindly an intention, and he 
is sure to wince. The skin of the man of letters is 
peculiarly sensitive to the bite of the critical mos- 
quito ; and he lives in a climate in which such mos- 
quitoes swarm. He is seldom stabbed to the heart — 
he is often killed by pin-pricks. 

But, to leave palisade and outwork, and come to 
the interior of the citadel, it may be said that great 
writers, although they must ever remain shining objects 
of regard to us, are not exempted from ordinary limita- 
tions and conditions. They are cabined, cribbed, 
confined, even as their more prosaic brethren. It is 
in the nature of every man to be endued with that he 
works in. Thus, in course of time, the merchant be- 
comes bound up in his ventures and his ledger ; an 
indefinable flavour of the pharmacopoeia lingers about 



160 Men of Letters. 

the physician ; the bombazin and horse-hair of the 
lawyer eat into his soul — his experiences are docqueted 
in a clerkly hand, bound together with red tape, and 
put away in professional pigeon-holes. A man natu- 
rally becomes leavened by the profession which he 
has adopted. He thinks, speaks, and dreams " shop," 
as the colloquial phrase has it. Men of letters are 
affected by their profession just as merchants, phy- 
sicians, and lawyers are. In course of time the inner 
man becomes stained with ink, like blotting-paper. 
The agriculturist talks constantly of bullocks — the 
man of letters constantly of books. The printing- 
press seems constantly in his immediate neighbour- 
hood. He is stretched on the rack of an unfavourable 
review, — he is lapped in the Elysium of a new edition. 
The narrowing effect of a profession is in every man 
a defect, albeit an inevitable one. Byron, who had a 
larger amount of common sense than any poet of his 
day, tells us, in " Beppo," 

" One hates an author that's all author ; fellows 
In foolscap uniforms turn'd up with ink. " 

And his lordship's " hate " in the matter is understand- 
able enough. In his own day, Scott and himself were 
almost the only distinguished authors who were not 
" all authors," just as Mr Helps and Sir Edward 
Bulwer Lytton are almost the only representatives of 
the class in ours. This professional taint not only re- 
sides in the writer, impairing his fulness and comple- 
tion ; it flows out of him into his work, and impairs 



Men of Letters. 161 

it also. It is the professional character which author- 
ship has assumed which has taken individuality and 
personal flavour from so much of our writing, and pre- 
vented to a large extent the production of enduring 
books. Our writing is done too hurriedly, and to 
serve a purpose too immediate. Literature is not so 
much an art as a manufacture. There is a demand, 
and too many crops are taken off the soil; it is never 
allowed to lie fallow, and to nourish itself in peaceful- 
ness and silence. When so many cups are to be 
filled, too much water is certain to be put into the 
teapot. Letters have become a profession, and prob- 
ably of all professions it is, in the long run, the least 
conducive to personal happiness. It is the most pre- 
carious. In it, above all others, to be weak is to be 
miserable. It is the least mechanical, consequently 
the most exhausting ; and in its higher walks it deals 
with a man's most vital material — utilises his emotions, 
trades on his faculties of love and imagination, uses 
for its own purposes the human heart by which he 
lives. These things a man requires for himself; and 
when they are in a large proportion transported to an 
ideal world, they make the ideal world all the more 
brilliant and furnished, and leave his ordinary exist- 
ence all the more arid and commonplace. You cannot 
spend money and have it ; you cannot use emotion 
and possess it. The poet who sings loudly of love 
and love's delights, may in the ordinary intercourse of 
life be all the colder for his singing. The man who 



1 6 2 Men of L e iters. 

has been moved while describing an imaginary death- 
bed to day, is all the more likely to be unmoved 
while standing by his friend's grave to-morrow. Shak- 
speare, after emerging from the moonlight in the 
Verona orchard, and Romeo and Juliet's silvery 
interchange of vows, was, I fear me, not marvellously 
enamoured of the autumn on Ann Hathaway's cheek. 
It is in some such way as this that a man's books 
may impoverish his life ; that the fire and heat of his 
genius may make his hearth all the colder. From 
considerations like these, one can explain satisfactorily 
enough to one's self the domestic misadventures of 
men of letters — of poets especially. We know the 
poets only in their books ; their wives know them out 
of them. Their wives see the other side of the moon ; 
and we have been made pretty well aware how they 
have appreciated that. 

The man engaged in the writing of books is tempted 
to make such writing the be-all and end-all of his 
existence — to grow his literature out of his history, ex- 
perience, or observation, as the gardener grows out of 
soils brought from a distance the plants which he in- 
tends to exhibit. The cup of life foams fiercely over 
into first books ; materials for the second, third, and 
fourth must be carefully sought for. The man of 
letters, as time passes on, and the professional im- 
pulse works deeper, ceases to regard the world with a 
single eye. The man slowly merges into the artist. 
He values new emotions and experiences, because he 



Men of Letters. 163 

can turn these into artistic shapes. He plucks 
" copy " from rising and setting suns. He sees 
marketable pathos in his friend's death-bed. He 
carries the peal of his daughter's marriage-bells into 
his sentences or his rhymes ; and in these the music 
sounds sweeter to him than in the sunshine and the 
wind. If originally of a meditative, introspective 
mood, his profession can hardly fail to confirm and 
deepen his peculiar temperament. He begins to feel 
his own pulse curiously, and for a purpose. As a spy 
in the service of literature, he lives in the world and 
its concerns. Out of everything he seeks thoughts 
and images, as out of everything the bee seeks wax 
and honey. A curious instance of this mode of look- 
ing at things occurs in Goethe's " Letters from Italy," 
with whom, indeed, it was a fashion, and who helped 
himself out of the teeming world to more effect than 
any man of his time : — 

" From Botzen to Trent the stage is nine leagues, 
and runs through a valley which constantly increases 
in fertility. All that merely struggles into vegetation 
on the higher mountains has here more strength and 
vitality. The sun shines with warmth, and there is 
once more belief in a Deity. 

" A poor woman cried out to me to take her child 
into my vehicle, as the soil was burning its feet. I 
did her this service out of honour to the strong light 
of Heaven. The child was strangely decked out, but 
I could get nothing from it in any way" 



164 Men of Letters. 

It is clear that out of all this the reader gains ; but 
I cannot help thinking that for the writer it tends to 
destroy entire and simple living — all hearty and final 
enjoyment in life. Joy and sorrow, death and mar- 
riage, the comic circumstance and the tragic, what 
befalls him, what he observes, what he is brought into 
contact with, do not affect him as they affect other 
men ; they are secrets to be rifled, stones to be built 
with, clays to be moulded into artistic shape. In 
giving emotional material artistic form, there is 
indisputably a certain noble pleasure ; but it is of 
a solitary and severe complexion, and takes a man 
out of the circle and sympathies of his fellows. I 
do not say that this kind of life makes a man 
selfish, but it often makes him seem so ; and the 
results of this seeming, on friendship and the domes- 
tic relationships, for instance, are as baleful as if sel- 
fishness really existed. The peculiar temptation 
which besets men of letters, the curious playing with 
thought and emotion, the tendency to analyse and 
take everything to pieces, has two results, and neither 
aids his happiness nor even his literary success. On 
the one hand, and in relation to the social relations, 
it gives him somewhat of an icy aspect, and so breaks 
the spring and eagerness of affectionate response. 
For the best affection is shy, reticent, undemonstra- 
tive, and needs to be drawn out by its like. If un- 
recognised, like an acquaintance on the street, it 
passes by, making no sign, and is for the time being 



Men of Letters. 165 

a stranger. On the other hand, the desire to say a 
fine thing about a phenomenon, whether natural or 
moral, prevents a man from reaching the inmost core 
of the phenomenon. Entrance into these matters will 
never be obtained by the most sedulous seeking. The 
man who has found an entrance cannot tell how he 
came there, and he will never find his way back again 
by the same road. From this law arises all the dreary 
conceits and artifices of the poets \ it is through the 
operation of the same law that many of our simple 
songs and ballads are inexpressibly affecting, because 
in them there is no consciousness of authorship \ emo- 
tion and utterance are twin^born, consentaneous — like 
sorrow and tears, a blow and its pain, a kiss and its 
thrill. When a man is happy, every effort to ex- 
press his happiness mars its completeness. I am not 
happy at all unless I am happier than I know. When 
the tide is full there is silence in channel and creek. 
The silence of the lover when he clasps the maid is 
better than the passionate murmur of the song which 
celebrates her charms. If to be near the rose makes 
the nightingale tipsy with delight, what must it be to 
be the rose herself? One feeling of the "wild joys of 
living — the leaping from rock to rock," is better than 
the "muscular-Christianity" literature which our time 
has produced. I am afraid that the profession of 
letters interferes with the elemental feelings of life ; 
and I am afraid, too, that in the majority of cases 
this interference is not justified by its results. The 



1 66 Men of Letters. 

entireness and simplicity of life is flawed by the intru- 
sion of an inquisitive element, and this inquisitive 
element never yet found anything which was much 
worth the finding. Men live by the primal energies 
of love, faith, imagination ; and happily it is not given 
to every one to live, in the pecuniary sense, by the 
artistic utilisation and sale of these. You cannot 
make ideas ; they must come unsought if they come 
at all. 

" From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine" 
is a profitable occupation enough, if you stumble on 
the little churchyard covered over with silence, and 
folded among the hills. If you go to the churchyard 
with intent to procure thoughts, as you go into the 
woods to gather anemones, you are wasting your 
time. Thoughts must come naturally, like wild 
flowers ; they cannot be forced in a hotbed — even 
although aided by the leaf-mould of your past — like 
exotics. And it is the misfortune of men of letters 
of our day that they cannot afford to wait for this 
natural flowering of thought, but are driven to the 
forcing process, with the results which were to be 
expected. 



ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A MAN TO 
HIMSELF. 

, ~pHE present writer remembers to have been visited 
once by a strange feeling of puzzlement ; and 
the puzzled feeling arose out of the following circum- 
stance : — He was seated in a railway-carriage, five 
minutes or so before starting, and had time to con- 
template certain waggons or trucks filled with cattle, 
drawn up on a parallel line, and quite close to the 
window at which he sat. The cattle wore a much- 
enduring aspect ; and, as he looked into their large, 
patient, melancholy eyes, — for, as before mentioned, 
there was no space to speak of intervening, — the 
feeling of puzzlement alluded to arose in his mind. 
And it consisted in an attempt to solve the existence 
before him, to enter into it, to understand it, and 
his inability to accomplish it, or indeed to make any 
way toward the accomplishment of it. The much- 
enduring animals in the trucks opposite had unques- 
tionably some rude twilight of a notion of a world ; 
of objects they had some unknown cognizance ; but 
he could not get behind the melancholy eye within a 
yard of him, and look through it. How, from that 



i6& On the Importance 

window, the world shaped itself, he could not dis- 
cover, could not even fancy ; and yet, staring on the 
animals, he was conscious of a certain fascination in 
which there lurked an element of terror. These wild, 
unkempt brutes, with slavering muzzles, penned to- 
gether, lived, could choose between this thing and the 
other, could be frightened, could be enraged, could 
even love and hate ; and gazing into a placid, heavy 
countenance, and the depths of a patient eye, not a 
yard away, he was conscious of an obscure and shud- 
dering recognition, of a life akin so far with his own. 
But to enter into that life imaginatively, and to con- 
ceive it, he found impossible. Eye looked upon eye, 
but the one could not flash recognition on the other ; 
and, thinking of this, he remembers, with what a sense 
of ludicrous horror, the idea came, — what, if looking 
on one another thus, some spark of recognition could 
be elicited ; if some rudiment of thought could be 
detected ; if there were indeed a point at which man 
and ox could meet and compare notes % Suppose 
some gleam or scintillation of humour had lighted up 
the unwinking, amber eye % Heavens, the bellow of 
the weaning calf would be pathetic, shoe-leather 
would be forsworn, the eating of roast meat, hot or 
cold, would be cannibalism, the terrified world would 
make a sudden dash into vegetarianism ! Happily, 
before fancy had time to play another vagary, with a 
snort and a pull the train moved on, and my truckful 
of horned friends were left gazing into empty space, 



of a Man to Himself. 169 

with the same wistful, patient, and melancholy expres- 
sion with which, for the space of five minutes or so, 
they had surveyed and bewildered me. 

A similar feeling of puzzlement to that which I have 
indicated, besets one not unfrequently in the contem- 
plation of men and women. You are brought in con- 
tact with a person, you attempt to comprehend him, 
to enter into him, in a word to be him, and, if you are 
not utterly foiled in the attempt, you cannot flatter 
yourself that you have been successful to the measure 
of your desire. A person interests, or piques, or tan- 
talises you, you do your best to make him out, yet 
strive as you will, you cannot read the riddle of his 
personality. From the invulnerable fortress of his 
own nature he smiles contemptuously on the be- 
leaguering armies of your curiosity and analysis. And 
it is not only the stranger that thus defeats you ; it 
may be the brother brought up by the same fireside 
with you, the best friend whom you have known from 
early school and college days, the very child, perhaps, 
that bears your name, and with whose moral and 
mental apparatus you think you are as familiar as 
with your own. In the midst of the most amicable 
relationships and the best understandings, human 
beings are, at times, conscious of a cold feeling of 
strangeness — the friend is actuated by a feeling which 
never could actuate you, some hitherto unknown part 
of his character becomes visible, and while at one 
moment you stood in such close neighbourhood, that 



1 70 On the Importance 

you could feel his arm touch your own, in the next 
there is a feeling of removal, of distance, of empty 
space betwixt him and you in which the wind is blow- 
ing. You and he become separate entities. He is 
related to you as Border peel is related to Border peel 
on Tweedside, or as ship is related to ship on the sea. 
It is not meant that any quarrel or direct misunder- 
standing should have taken place, simply that feeling 
of foreignness is meant to be indicated which occurs 
now and then in the intercourse of the most affec- 
tionate ; which comes as a harsh reminder to friends 
and lovers that with whatsoever flowery bands they 
may be linked, they are separated persons, who 
understand, and can only understand, each other 
partially. It is annoying to be put out in our notions 
of men and women thus, and to be forced to rearrange 
them. It is a misfortune to have to manoeuvre one's 
heart as a general has to manoeuvre his army. The 
globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet 
has ; you may survey a kingdom and note the result 
in maps, but all the savants in the world could not pro- 
duce a reliable map of the poorest human personality. 
And the worst of all this is, that love and friendship 
may be the outcome of a certain condition of know- 
ledge; increase the knowledge, and love and friendship 
beat their wings and go. Every man's road in life is 
marked by the graves of his personal likings. In- 
timacy is frequently the road to indifference, and 
marriage, a parricide. From these accidents to the 



of a Man to Himself 1 7 1 

affections, and from the efforts to repair them, life 
has in many a patched and tinkered look. 

Love and friendship are the discoveries of our- 
selves in others, and our delight in the recognition ; 
and in men, as in books, we only know that, the 
parallel of which, we have in ourselves. We know 
only that portion of the world which we have travelled 
over ; and we are never a whit wiser than our own 
experiences. Imagination, the falcon, sits on the 
wrist of Experience, the falconer ; she can never soar 
beyond the reach of his whistle, and when tired she 
must return to her perch. Our knowledge is limited 
by ourselves, and so also are our imaginations. And 
so it comes about, that a man measures everything by 
his own foot-rule ; that if he is ignoble, all the ignoble- 
ness that is in the world looks out upon him, and 
claims kindred with him ; if noble, all the nobleness 
in the world does the like. Shakspeare is always the 
same height with his reader ; and when a thousand 
Christians subscribe to one Confession of Faith, hardly 
to two of them does it mean the same thing. The 
world is a great warehouse of raiment, to which every 
one has access and is allowed free use ; and the re- 
markable thing is, what coarse stuffs are often chosen, 
and how scantily some people are attired. 

We never get quit of ourselves. While I am writing, 
the spring is outside, and this season of the year 
touches my spirit always with a sense of newness, of 
strangeness, of resurrection. It shoots boyhood again 



1 7 2 On the Importance 

into the blood of middle age. That tender greening 
of the black bough and the red field, — that coming 
again of the new-old flowers, — that re-birth of love in 
all the family of birds, with cooings, and caressings, 
and building of nests in wood and brake, — that strange 
glory of sunshine in the air,— that stirring of life in 
the green mould, making even churchyards beautiful, 
• — seems like the creation of a new world. And yet — 
and yet, even with the lamb in the sunny field, the lark 
mile-high in the blue, Spring has her melancholy side, 
and bears a sadder burden to the heart than Autumn, 
preaching of decay with all his painted woods. For 
the flowers that make sweet the moist places in the 
forest are not the same that bloomed the year before. 
Another lark sings above the furrowed field. Nature 
rolls on in her eternal course, repeating her tale of 
spring, summer, autumn, winter ; but life in man and 
beast is transitory, and other living creatures take their 
places. It is quite certain that one or other of the 
next twenty springs will come unseen by me, will 
awake no throb of transport in my veins. But will it 
be less bright on that account? Will the lamb be 
saddened in the field ? Will the lark be less happy in 
the air? The sunshine will draw the daisy from the 
mound under which I sleep, as carelessly as she draws 
the cowslip from the meadow by the river-side. The 
seasons have no ruth, no compunction. They care 
not for our petty lives. The light falls sweetly on 
graveyards, and on brown labourers among the hay- 



of a Man to Himself. 173 

swathes. Were the world depopulated to-morrow, 
next spring would break pitilessly bright, flowers would 
bloom, fruit-tree boughs wear pink and white; and 
although there would be no eye to witness, Summer 
would not adorn herself with one blossom the less. 
It is curious to think how important a creature a man 
is to himself. We cannot help thinking that all things 
exist for our particular selves. The sun, in whose 
light a system lives, warms me; makes the trees grow 
for me; paints the evening sky in gorgeous colours 
for me. The mould I till, produced from the beds of 
extinct oceans and the grating of rock and mountain 
during countless centuries, exists that I may have 
muffins to breakfast. Animal life, with its strange 
instincts and affections, is to be recognised and 
cherished, — for does it not draw my burdens for me, 
and carry me from place to place, and yield me com- 
fortable broad-cloth, and succulent joints to dinner? 
I think it matter of complaint that Nature, like a per- 
sonal friend to whom I have done kind services, will 
not wear crape at my funeral. I think it cruel that 
the sun should shine, and birds sing, and I lying in 
my grave. People talk of the age of the world ! So 
far as I am concerned, it began with my conscious- 
ness, and will end with my decease. 

And yet, this self-consciousness, which so continu- 
ally besets us, is in itself a misery and a galling chain. 
We are never happy till by imagination we are taken 
out of the pales and limits of self. We receive happi- 



1 74 On the Importance 

ness at second hand : the spring of it may be in our- 
selves, but we do not know it to be happiness, till, 
like the sun's light from the moon, it is reflected 
on us from an object outside. The admixture of 
a foreign element sweetens and unfamiliarises it. 
Sheridan prepared his good things in solitude, but 
he tasted for the first time his jest's prosperity when 
it came back to him in illumined faces and a roar 
of applause. Your oldest story becomes new when 
you have a new auditor. A young man is truth- 
loving and amiable ; but it is only when these fair 
qualities shine upon him from a girl's face that 
he is smitten by transport — only then is he truly 
happy. In that junction of hearts, in that ecstacy of 
mutual admiration and delight, the finest epithalamium 
ever writ by poet is hardly worthy of the occasion. 
The countryman purchases oranges at a fair for his 
little ones ; and when he brings them home in the 
evening, and watches his chubby urchins, sitting up 
among the bedclothes, peel and devour the fruit, he 
is for the time being richer than if he drew the rental 
of the orange-groves of Seville. To eat an orange 
himself is nothing ; to see them eat it is a pleasure 
worth the price of the fruit a thousand times over. 
There is no happiness in the world in which love does 
not enter ; and love is but the discovery of ourselves 
in others, and the delight in the recognition. Apart 
from others, no man can make his happiness ; just 
as, apart from a mirror of one kind or another, no 



of a Man to Himself. 175 

man can become acquainted with his own linea- 
ments. 

The accomplishment of a man is the light by which 
we are enabled to discover the limits of his person- 
ality. Every man brings into the world with him a 
certain amount of pith and force, and to that pith or 
force his amount of accomplishment is exactly pro- 
portioned. It is in this way that every spoken word, 
every action of a man, becomes biographical. Every- 
thing a man says or does is in consistency with him- 
self; and it is by looking back on his sayings and 
doings that we arrive at the truth concerning him. A 
man is one ; and every outcome of him has a family 
resemblance. Goldsmith did not " write like an angel 
and talk like poor Poll," as we may in part discern 
from Boswell's " Johnson." Strange, indeed, if a man 
talked continually the sheerest nonsense, and wrote 
continually the gracefulest humours ; if a man was 
lame on the street, and the finest dancer in the ball- 
room. To describe a character by antithesis is like 
painting a portrait in black and white — ah the curious 
intermixtures and gradations of colour are lost. The 
accomplishment of a human being is measured by his 
strength, or by his nice tact in using his strength. 
The distance to which your gun, whether rifled or 
smooth-bored, will carry its shot, depends upon the 
force of its charge. A runner's speed and endurance 
depends upon his depth of chest and elasticity of limb. 
If a poet's lines lack harmony, it instructs us that there 



176 On the Importance 

is a certain lack of harmony in himself. We see why 
Haydon failed as an artist when we read his life. No 
one can dip into the " Excursion" without discovering 
that Wordsworth was devoid of humour, and that he 
cared more for the narrow Cumberland vale than he 
did for the big world. The flavour of opium can be 
detected in the "Ancient Mariner" and " Christabel." 
A man's word or deed takes us back to himself, as 
the sunbeam takes us back to the sun. It is the 
sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, 
in the wide arena of the world, failure and success are 
not accidents, as we so frequently suppose, but the 
strictest justice. If you do your fair day's work, you 
are certain to get your fair day's wage— in praise or 
pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste. You 
may have seen at country fairs a machine by which 
the rustics test their strength of arm. A country 
fellow strikes vigorously a buffer, which recoils, and 
the amount of the recoil — dependent, of course, on 
the force with which it is struck — is represented by a 
series of notches or marks. The world is such a 
buffer. A man strikes it with all his might : his mark 
may be L. 40, 000, a peerage and Westminster Abbey, 
a name in literature or art ; but in every case his 
mark is nicely determined by the force or the art with 
which the buffer is struck. Into the world a man 
brings his personality, and his biography is simply a 
catalogue of its results. 

There are some men who have no individuality, 



of a Man to Himself. 177 

just as there are some men who have no face. These 
are to be described by generals, not by particulars. 
They are thin, vapid, inconclusive. They are impor- 
tant solely on account of their numbers. For them 
the census enumerator labours ; they form majorities ; 
they crowd voting-booths j they make the money ; 
they do the ordinary work of the world. They are 
valuable when well officered. They are plastic matter 
to be shaped by a workman's hand ; and are built 
with as bricks are built with. In the aggregate, they 
form public opinion ; but then, in eveiy age, public 
opinion is the disseminated thoughts of some half 
a dozen men, who are in all probability sleeping 
quietly in their graves. They retain dead men's ideas, 
just as the atmosphere retains the light and heat of 
the set sun. They are not light — they are twilight. 
To know how to deal with such men — to know how 
to use them — is the problem which ambitious force is 
called upon to solve. Personality, individuality, force 
of character, or by whatever name we choose to de- 
signate original and vigorous manhood, is the best 
thing which nature has in her gift. The forceful man 
is a prophecy of the future. The wind blows here, but 
long after it is spent, the big wave which is its crea- 
ture, breaks on a shore a thousand miles away. It is 
curious how swiftly influences travel from centre to 
circumference. A certain empress invents a gracefully 
pendulous crinoline, and immediately, from Paris to 
the pole, the female world is behooped ; and neither 



ij8 On the Importance 

objurgation of brother, lover, or husband, deaths by 
burning or machinery, nor all the wit of the satirists, 
are likely to affect its vitality. Never did an idea go 
round civilisation so rapidly. Crinoline has already a 
heavier martyrology than many a creed. The world is 
used easily, if one can only hit on the proper method ; 
and force of character, originality, of whatever kind, 
is always certain to make its mark. It is a diamond, 
and the world is its pane of glass. In a world so 
commonplace as this, the peculiar man even should be 
considered a blessing. Humorousness, eccentricity, the 
habit of looking at men and things from an odd angle, 
are valuable, because they break the dead level of 
society, and take away its sameness. It is well that 
a man should be known by something else than his 
name : there are few of us who can be known by any- 
thing else, and Brown, Jones, and Robinson are the 
names of the majority. 

In literature and art, this personal outcome is of 
the highest value ; in fact, it is the only thing truly 
valuable. The greatness of an artist or a writer does 
not depend on what he has in common with other 
artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to 
himself. The great man is the man who does a thing 
for the first time. It was a difficult thing to discover 
America; since it has been discovered, it has been 
found an easy enough task to sail thither. It is this 
peculiar something resident in a poem or a painting 
which is its final test, — at all events, possessing it, it 



of a Man to Himself. 179 

has the elements of endurance. Apart from its other 
values, it has, in virtue of that, a biographical one ; it 
becomes a study of character; it is a window through 
which you can look into a human interior. There is 
a cleverness in the world which seems to have neither 
father nor mother. It exists, but it is impossible to 
tell from whence it comes, — just as it is impossible to 
lift the shed apple-blossom of an orchard, and to 
discover, from its bloom and odour, to what branch it 
belonged. Such cleverness illustrates nothing : it is 
an anonymous letter. Look at it ever so long, and 
you cannot tell its lineage. It lives in the catalogue 
of waifs and strays. On the other hand, there are 
men whose every expression is characteristic, whose 
every idea seems to come out of a mould. In 
the short sentence, or curt, careless saying of such, 
when laid bare, you can read their histories so far, as 
in the smallest segment of a tree you can trace the 
markings of its rings. The first dies, because it is 
shallow-rooted, and has no vitality beyond its own; 
the second lives, because it is related to and fed by 
something higher than itself. The famous axiom of 
Mrs Glass, that in order to make hare-soup you "must 
first catch your hare,' 5 has a wide significance. In art, 
literature, social life, morals even, you must first catch 
your man : that done, everything else follows as a 
matter of course. A man may learn much ; but for 
the most important thing of all he can find neither 
teachers nor schools. 



1 80 On the Importance 

Each man is the most important thing in the world 
to himself; but why is he to himself so important? 
Simply because he is a personality with capacities of 
pleasure, of pain, who can be hurt, who can be 
pleased, who can be disappointed, who labours and 
expects his hire, in whose consciousness, in fact, for 
the time being, the whole universe lives. He is, and 
everything else is relative. Confined to his own per- 
sonality, making it his tower of outlook, from which 
only he can survey the outer world, he naturally 
enough forms a rather high estimate of its value, 
of its dignity, of its intrinsic worth. This high 
estimate is useful in so far as it makes his con- 
dition pleasant, and it — or rather our proneness to 
form it — we are accustomed to call vanity. Vanity — 
which really helps to keep the race alive — has been 
treated harshly by the moralists and satirists. It 
does not quite deserve the hard names it has been 
called. It interpenetrates everything a man says 
or does, but it interpenetrates for a useful purpose. 
If it is always an alloy in the pure gold of virtue, 
it at least does the service of an alloy — making 
the precious metal workable. Nature gave man his 
powers, appetites, aspirations, and along with these 
a pan of incense, which fumes from the birth of con- 
sciousness to its decease, making the best part of 
life rapture, and the worst part endurable. But 
for vanity the race would have died out long ago. 
There are some men whose lives seem to us as un- 



of a Man to Ht7nself. 1 8 1 

desirable as the lives of toads or serpents ; yet these 
men breathe in tolerable content and satisfaction. If 
a man could hear all that his fellows say of him — that 
he is stupid, that he is henpecked, that he will be in 
the Gazette in a week, that his brain is softening, that 
he has said all his best things — and if he could be- 
lieve that these pleasant things are true, he would be 
in his grave before the month was out. Happily no 
man does hear these things ; and if he did, they would 
only provoke inextinguishable wrath or inextinguish- 
able laughter. A man receives the shocks of life on 
the buffer of his vanity. Vanity acts as his second 
and bottleholder in the world's prize-ring, and it 
fights him well, bringing him smilingly up to time 
after the fiercest knock-down blows. Vanity is to a 
man what the oily secretion is to a bird, with which it 
sleeks and adjusts the plumage ruffled by whatever 
causes. Vanity is not only instrumental in keeping a 
man alive and in heart, but, in its lighter manifesta- 
tions, it is the great sweetener of social existence. It 
is the creator of dress and fashion ; it is the inventor 
of forms and ceremonies ; to it we are indebted 
for all our traditions of civility. For vanity in its 
idler moments is benevolent, is as willing to give 
pleasure as to take it, and accepts as sufficient re- 
ward for its services a kind word or an approving 
smile. It delights to bask in the sunshine of appro- 
bation. Out of man vanity makes gentleman. The 
proud man is cold, the selfish man hard and griping — 



1 82 On the Importance 

the vain man desires to shine, to please, to make him- 
self agreeable ; and this amiable feeling works to the 
outside in suavity and charm of manner. The 
French are the vainest people in Europe, and the 
most polite. 

As each man is to himself the most important 
thing in the world, each man is an egotist in his 
thinkings, in his desires, in his fears. It does not, 
however, follow that each man must be an egotist — 
as the word is popularly understood — in his speech. 
But even although this were the case, the world 
would be divided into egotists, likable and unlikable. 
There are two kinds of egotism, a trifling vain glori- 
ous kind, a mere burning of personal incense, in which 
the man is at once altar, priest, censer, and divinity ; a 
kind which deals with the accidents and wrappages of 
the speaker, his equipage, his riches, his family, his ser- 
vants, his furniture and array. The other kind has no 
taint of self-aggrandizement, but is rooted in the facul- 
ties of love and humour ; and this latter kind is never 
offensive, because it includes others, and knows no 
scorn or exclusiveness. The one is the offspring of a 
narrow 'and unimaginative personality ; the other of a 
large and genial one. There are persons who are the 
terrors of society. Perfectly innocent of evil inten- 
tion, they are yet, with a certain brutal unconscious- 
ness, continually trampling on other people's corns. 
They touch you every now and again like a red-hot 
iron. You wince, acquit them of any desire to wound. 



of a Man to Himself. 183 

but find forgiveness a hard task. These persons 
remember everything about themselves, and forget 
everything about you. They have the instinct of a 
flesh-fly for a raw. Should your great-grandfather 
have had the misfortune to be hanged, such a person 
is certain, on some public occasion, to make allusion 
to your pedigree. He will probably insist on your 
furnishing him with a sketch of your family-tree. If your 
daughter has made a runaway marriage — on which 
subject yourself and friends maintain a judicious 
silence — he is certain to stumble upon it, -and make 
the old sore smart again. In all this there is no 
malice, no desire to wound ; it arises simply from 
want of imagination, from profound immersion in 
self. An imaginative man recognises at once a por- 
tion of himself in his fellow, and speaks to that. To 
hurt you is to hurt himself. Much of the rudeness 
we encounter in life cannot be properly set down 
to cruelty or badness of heart. The unimaginative 
man is callous, and although he hurts easily, he 
cannot be easily hurt in return. The imaginative 
man is sensitive and merciful to others out of the 
merest mercy to himself. 

In literature, as in social life, the attractiveness of 
egotism depends entirely upon the egotist. If he be 
a conceited man, full of self-admirations and vain- 
glories, his egotism will disgust and repel. When he 
sings his own praises, his reader feels that reflections 
are being thrown on himself, and in a natural revenge 



1 84 On the Importance 

he calls the writer a coxcomb. If, on the other 
hand, he be loving, genial, humorous, with a sympathy 
for others, his garrulousness and his personal allusions 
are forgiven, because while revealing himself, he is 
revealing his reader as well. A man may write about 
himself during his whole life without once tiring or 
offending ; but to accomplish this, he must be inter- 
esting in himself— be a man of curious and vagrant 
moods, gifted with the cunningest tact and humour ; 
and the experience which he relates must at a thou- 
sand points touch the experiences of his readers, so 
that they, as it were, become partners in his game. 
When X. tells me, with an evident swell of pride, that 
he dines constantly with half-a-dozen men-servants in 
attendance, or that he never drives abroad save in a 
coach-and-six, I am not conscious of any special gra- 
titude to X. for the information. Possibly, if my 
establishment boasts only of Cinderella, and if a cab is 
the only vehicle in which I can afford to ride, and all 
the more if I can indulge in that only on occasions of 
solemnity, I fly into a rage, pitch the book to the 
other end of the room, and may never afterwards be 
brought to admit that X. is possessor of a solitary 
ounce of brains. If, on the other hand, Z. informs 
me that every February he goes out to the leafless 
woods to hunt early snow-drops, and brings home 
bunches of them in his hat ; or that he prefers in 
woman a brown eye to a blue, and explains by early 
love passages his reasons for the preference, I do not 



of a Man to Himself. 185 

get angry ; on the contrary, I feel quite pleased ; 
perhaps, if the matter is related with unusual grace 
and tenderness, it is read with a certain moisture and 
dimness of eye. And the reason is obvious. The 
egotistical X. is barren, and suggests nothing beyond 
himself, save that he is a good deal better off than I 
am — a reflection much pleasanter to him than it is to 
me j whereas the equally egotistical Z., with a single 
sentence about his snow-drops, or his liking for brown 
eyes rather than for blue, sends my thoughts wander- 
ing away back among my dead spring-times, or wafts 
me the odours of the roses of those summers when 
the colour of an eye was of more importance than it 
now is. X.'s men-servants and coach-and-six do not 
fit into the life of his reader, because in all probability 
his reader knows as much about these things as he 
knows about Pharaoh; Z.'s snow-drops and preferences 
of colour do, because every one knows what the 
spring thirst is, and every one in his time has been en- 
slaved by eyes whose colour he could not tell for his 
life, but which he knew were the tenderest that ever 
looked love, the brightest that ever flashed sunlight. 
Montaigne and Charles Lamb are egotists of the Z. 
class, and the world never wearies reading them ; nor 
are egotists of the X. school absolutely without en- 
tertainment. Several of these the world reads assidu- 
ously too, although for another reason. The avid 
vanity of Mr Pepys would be gratified if made aware 
of the success of his diary ; but curiously to inquire 



1 86 On the Importance of a Man, &c. 

into the reason of that success, why his diary has been 
found so amusing, would not conduce to his comfort. 
After all, the only thing a man knows is himself. 
The world outside he can know only by hearsay. 
His shred of personality is all he has ; than that, he 
is nothing richer, nothing poorer. Everything else is 
mere accident and appendage. Alexander must not 
be measured by the shoutings of his armies, nor 
Lazarus at Dives' gates by his sores. And a man 
knows himself only in part. In every nature, as in 
Australia, there is an unexplored territory — green, well- 
watered regions or mere sandy deserts ; and into that 
territory experience is making progress day by day. 
We can remember when we knew only the outer 
childish rim — and from the crescent guessed the 
sphere; whether, as we advanced, these guesses have 
been realised, each knows for himself. 



A SHELF IN MY BOOKCASE. 

TX7"HEN a man glances critically through the circle 
of his intimate friends, he is obliged to con- 
fess that they are far from being perfect. They pos- 
sess neither the beauty of Apollo, nor the wisdom of 
Solon,' nor the wit of Mercutio, nor the reticence of 
Napoleon III. If pushed hard he will be constrained 
to admit that he has known each and all get angry 
without sufficient occasion, make at times the foolish- 
est remarks, and act as if personal comfort were the 
highest thing in their estimation. Yet, driven thus 
to the wall, forced to make such uncomfortable con- 
fessions, our supposed man does not like his friends 
one whit the less ; nay, more, he is aware that if they 
were very superior and faultless persons he would 
not be conscious of so much kindly feeling towards 
them. The tide of friendship does not rise high on 
the bank of perfection. Amiable weaknesses and 
shortcomings are the food of love. It is from the 
roughnesses and imperfect breaks in a man that you 
are able to lay hold of him. If a man be an entire and 
perfect chrysolite, you slide off him and fall back into 



1 88 A Shelf in my Bookcase. 

ignorance. My friends are not perfect — no more am 
I — and so we suit each other admirably. Their weak- 
nesses keeps mine in countenance, and so saves me 
from humiliation and shame. We give and take, bear 
and forbear ; the stupidity they utter to-day salves the 
recollection of the stupidity I uttered yesterday ; in 
their want of wit I see my own, and so feel satisfied 
and kindly disposed. It is one of the charitable dis- 
pensations of Providence that perfection is not essen- 
tial to friendship. If I had to seek my perfect man, 
I should wander the world a good while, and when 
I found him, and was down on my knees before him, 
he would, to a certainty, turn the cold shoulder on 
me — and so life would be an eternal search, broken 
by the coldness of repulse and loneliness. Only to 
the perfect being in an impefect world, or the imper- 
fect being in a perfect world, is everything irretriev- 
ably out of joint. 

On a certain shelf, in the bookcase which stands in 
the room in which I am at present sitting — bookcase 
surmounted by a white Dante, looking out with blind, 
majestic eyes — are collected a number of volumes 
which look somewhat the worse for wear. Those of 
them which originally possessed gilding have had it 
fingered off, each of them has leaves turned down, 
and they open of themselves at places wherein I have 
been happy, and with whose every word I am familiar 
as with the furniture of the room in which I nightly 
slumber; each of them has remarks relevant and 



A Shelf in my Bookcase. 189 

irrelevant scribbled on their margins. These favourite 
volumes cannot be called peculiar glories of literature ; 
but out of the world of books have I singled them, as 
I have singled my intimates out of the world of men. 
I am on easy terms with them, and feel that they 
are no higher than my heart. Milton is not there, 
neither is Wordsworth ; Shakspeare, if he had written 
comedies only, would have been there to a certainty, 
but the presence of thtfive great tragedies, — Hamlet, 
Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Antony and Cleopatra — 
for this last should be always included among his 
supreme efforts — has made me place him on the shelf 
where the mighty men repose, himself the mightiest 
of all. Reading Milton is like dining off gold plate 
in a company of kings ; very splendid, very cere- 
monious, and not a little appalling. Him I read but 
seldom, and only on high days and festivals of the 
spirit. Him I never lay down without feeling my 
appreciation increased for lesser men — never without 
the same kind of comfort that one returning from the 
presence feels when he doffs respectful attitude and 
dress of ceremony, and subides into old coat, familiar 
arm-chair, and slippers. After long-continued organ- 
music, the jangle of the Jew's harp is felt as an ex- 
quisite relief. With the volumes on the special shelf 
I have spoken of, I am quite at home, and I feel 
somehow as if they were at home with me. And as 
to-day the trees bend to the blast, and the rain comes 
in dashes against my window, and as I have nothing 



190 A Shelf in my Bookcase. 

to do and cannot get out, and wish to kill the hours 
in as pleasant a manner as I can, I shall even talk 
about them, as in sheer liking a man talks about the 
trees in his garden, or the pictures on his wall. I 
can't expect to say anything very new or striking, but 
I can give utterance to sincere affection, and that is 
always pleasant to one's self and generally not ungrate- 
ful to others. 

First, then, on this special shelf stands Nathaniel 
Hawthorne's " Twice-Told Tales." It is difficult to 
explain why I like these short sketches and essays, 
written in the author's early youth, better than his later, 
more finished, and better-known novels and romances. 
The world sets greater store by " The Scarlet Letter" 
and "Transformation" than by this little book — and, 
in such matters of liking against the judgment of 
the world, there is no appeal. I think the reason of my 
liking consists in this — that the novels were written 
for the world, while the tales seem written for the 
author ; in these he is actor and audience in one. Con- 
sequently, one gets nearer him, just as one gets nearer 
an artist in his first sketch than in his finished picture. 
And after all, one takes the greatest pleasure in those 
books in which a peculiar personality is most clearly 
revealed. A thought may be very commendable as a 
thought, but I value it chiefly as a window through 
which I can obtain insight on the thinker; and Mr 
Hawthorne's personality is peculiar, and specially 
peculiar in a new country like America. He is quiet, 



A Shelf in my Bookcase. 191 

fanciful, quaint, and his humour is shaded by a certain 
meditativeness of spirit. Although a Yankee, he par- 
takes of none of the characteristics of a Yankee. 
His thinking and his style have an antique air. His 
roots strike down through the visible mould of the pre- 
sent, and draw sustenance from the generations under 
ground. The ghosts that haunt the chamber of his 
mind are the ghosts of dead men and women. He 
has a strong smack of the Puritan ; he wears around 
him, in the New-England town, something of the 
darkness and mystery of the aboriginal forest. He is 
a shy, silent, sensitive, much-ruminating man, with no 
special overflow of animal spirits. He loves solitude 
and the things which age has made reverent. There 
is nothing modern about him. Emerson's writing has 
a cold cheerless glitter, like the new furniture in a 
warehouse, which will come of use by and by ; Haw- 
thorne's, the rich, subdued colour of furniture in a 
Tudor mansion-house — which has winked to long- 
extinguished fires, which has been toned by the usage 
of departed generations. In many of the "Twice- 
Told Tales'' this peculiar personality is charmingly 
exhibited. He writes of the street or the sea-shore, 
his eye takes in every object, however trifling, and on 
these he hangs comments melancholy and humorous. 
He does not require to go far for a subject ; he will 
stare on the puddles in the street of a New-England 
village, and immediately it becomes a Mediterranean 
Sea with empires lying on its muddy shores. If the 



192 A Shelf in my Bookcase. 

sermon be written out fully in your heart, almost any 
text will be suitable — if you have to find your sermon 
in your text, you may search the Testament, New and 
Old, and be as poor at the close of Revelation as 
when you started at the first book of Genesis. Seve- 
ral of the papers which I like best are monologues, 
fanciful, humorous, or melancholy ; and of these, my 
chief favourites are — " Sunday at Home," " Night 
Sketches," " Footprints on the Sea-shore," and the 
" Seven Vagabonds." This last seems to me almost the 
most exquisite thing which has flowed from its author's 
pen — a perfect little drama, the place a showman's 
waggon, the time the falling of a summer shower, full 
of subtle suggestions, which, if followed, will lead the 
reader away out of the story altogether ; and illumi- 
nated by a grave, wistful kind of humour, which 
plays in turns upon the author's companions, and 
upon the author himself. Of all Mr Hawthorne's 
gifts, this gift of humour — which would light up the 
skull and cross-bones of a village churchyard, which 
would be silent at a dinner-table — is to me the most 
delightful. 

Then this writer has a strangely weird power. He 
loves ruins like the ivy, he skims the twilight like the 
bat, he makes himself a familiar of the phantoms of the 
heart and brain. He believes in ghosts ; perhaps he 
has seen one burst on him from the impalpable air. He 
is fascinated by the jarred brain and the ruined heart. 
Other men collect china, books, pictures, jewels, this 



A Shelf in my Bookcase. 193 

writer collects singular human experiences, ancient 
wrongs and agonies, murders done on unfrequented 
roads, crimes that seem to have no motive, and all 
the dreary mysteries of the world of will. To his 
chamber of horrors Madame Taussaud's is nothing. 
With proud, prosperous, healthy men, Mr Hawthorne 
has little sympathy ; he prefers a cracked piano to a 
new one, he likes cobwebs in the corner of his rooms. 
All this peculiar taste comes out strongly in the little 
book in whose praise I am writing. I read " The Minis- 
ter's Black Veil," and find it the first sketch of the 
" Scarlet Letter." In " Wakefield "—the story of the 
man who left his wife, remaining away twenty years, but 
who yet looked upon her every day to appease his burn- 
ing curiosity as to her manner of enduring his absence 
— I find the keenest analysis of an almost incompre- 
hensible act. And then Mr Hawthorne has a skill in 
constructing allegories which no one of his contem- 
poraries, either English or American, possesses. These 
allegorical papers may be read with pleasure, for 
their ingenuity, their grace, their poetical feeling ; but 
just as, gazing on the surface of a stream, admiring 
the ripples and eddies, and the widening rings made 
by the butterfly falling into it, you begin to be con- 
scious that there is something at the bottom, and 
gradually a dead face wavers upwards from the oozy 
weeds, becoming every moment more clearly defined, 
so through Mr Hawthorne's graceful sentences, if read 
attentively, begins to flash the hidden meaning, a 

N 



194 A Shelf in my Bookcase. 

meaning, perhaps, the writer did not care to express 
formally and in set terms, and which he merely sug- 
gests and leaves the reader to make out for himself. 
If you have the book I am writing about, turn up 
"David Swan," "The Great Carbuncle," "The Fancy 
Show-box," and after you have read these, you will 
understand what I mean. 

The next two books on my shelf — books at this 
moment leaning on the "Twice -Told Tales'' — 
are Professor Aytoun's "Ballads of Scotland," and 
the " Lyra Germanica." These books I keep side 
by side with a purpose. The forms of existence 
with which they deal seem widely separated ; but 
a strong kinship exists between them for all that. I 
open Professor Aytoun's book, and all this modern 
life — with its railways, its newspapers, its crowded 
cities, its Lancashire distresses, its debates in Parlia- 
ment — fades into nothingness and silence. Scot- 
land, from Edinburgh rock to the Tweed, stretches 
away in rude spaces of moor and forest. The wind 
blows across it, unpolluted by the smoke of towns. 
That which lives now has not yet come into exist- 
ence ; what are to-day crumbling and ivied ruins, are 
warm with household fires, and filled with human 
activities. Every Border keep is a home : brides are 
taken there in their blushes ; children are born there ; 
gray men, the crucifix held over them, die there. 
The moon dances on a plump of spears, as the moss- 
troopers, by secret and desert paths, ride over into 



A Shelf in my Bookcase. 195 

England to lift a prey, and the bale-fire on the hill 
gives the alarm to Cumberland. Men live and 
marry, and support wife and little ones by steel-jacket 
and spear ; and the Flower of Yarrow, when her 
larder is empty, claps a pair of spurs in her hus- 
band's platter. A time of strife and foray, of plunder- 
ing and burning, of stealing and reaving ; when hate 
waits half a life-time for revenge, and where difficulties 
are solved by the slash of a sword-blade. I open the 
German book, and find a warfare conducted in a diffe- 
rent manner. Here the Devil rides about wasting and 
destroying. Here temptations lie in wait for the soul • 
here pleasures, like glittering meteors, lure it into 
marshes and abysses. Watch and ward are kept here, 
and to sleep at the post is death. Fortresses are 
built on the rock of God's promises — inaccessible to 
the arrows of the wicked, — and therein dwell many 
trembling souls. Conflict rages around, not con- 
ducted by Border spear on barren moorland, but by 
weapons of faith and prayer in the devout German 
heart ; — a strife earnest as the other, with issues of 
life and death. And the resemblance between the 
books lies in this, that when we open them these past 
experiences and conditions of life gleam visibly to us 
far down like submerged cities — all empty and hollow 
now, though once filled with life as real as our own — 
through transparent waters. 

In glancing over these German hymns, one is 
struck by their adaptation to the seasons and occur- 



196 A Shelf in my Bookcase. 

rences of ordinary life. Obviously, too, the writer's 
religion was not a Sunday matter only, it had its 
place in week-days as well. In these hymns there 
is little gloom ; a healthy human cheerfulness per- 
vades many of them, and this is surely as it ought 
to be. These hymns, as I have said, are adapted 
to the occasions of ordinary life, and this speaks 
favourably of the piety which produced them. I do 
not suppose that we English are less religious than 
other nations, but we are undemonstrative in this, 
as in most things. We have the sincerest horror of 
over-dressing ourselves in fine sentiments. We are a 
little shy of religion. We give it a day entirely to 
itself, and make it a stranger to the other six. We 
confine it in churches, or in the closet at home, and 
never think of taking it with us to the street, or into 
our business, or with us to the festival, or the gather- 
ing of friends. Dr Arnold used to complain that he 
could get religious subjects treated in a masterly way, 
but could not get common subjects treated in a re- 
ligious spirit. The Germans have done better ; they 
have melted down the Sunday into the week. They 
have hymns embodying confessions of sin, hymns in 
the near prospect of death ; and they have — what is 
more important — spiritual songs that may be sung by 
soldiers on the march, by the artisan at the loom, by 
the peasant following his team, by the mother among 
her children, and by the maiden sitting at her wheel 
listening for the step of her lover. Religion is thus 



A Shelf in my Bookcase. 197 

brought in to refine and hallow the sweet necessities 
and emotions of life, to cheer its weariness, and to 
exalt its sordidness. The German life revolves like 
the village festival with the pastor in the midst — joy 
and laughter and merry games do not fear the holy 
man, for he wears no unkindness in his eye, but his 
presence checks everything boisterous or unseemly, — 
the rude word, the petulant act, — and when it has 
run its course, he uplifts his hands and leaves his bene- 
diction on his children. 

The " Lyra Germanica" contains the utterances of 
pious German souls in all conditions of life during 
many centuries. In it hymns are to be found written 
not only by poor clergymen, and still poorer precentors, 
by riband-manufacturers and shoemakers, who, amid 
rude environments, had a touch of celestial melody in 
their hearts, but by noble ladies and gentlemen, and 
crowned kings. The oldest in the collection is one 
written by King Robert of France about the year 1000. 
It is beautifully simple and pathetic. State is laid 
aside with the crown, pride with the royal robe, and 
Lazarus at Dives' gate could not have written out of 
a lowlier heart. The kingly brow may bear itself high 
enough before men, the voice may be commanding 
and imperious enough, cutting through contradiction 
as with a sword, but before the Highest all is humble- 
ness and bended knees. Other compositions there 
are, scattered through the volume, by great personages 
■ — several by Louisa Henrietta, Electress of Brand en- 



198 A Shelf in my Bookcase. 

burg, and Anton Ulrick, Duke of Brunswick — all 
written two hundred years ago. These are genuine 
poems, full of faith and charity, and calm trust in 
God. They are all dead now, these noble gentlemen 
and gentlewomen ; their warfare, successful or adverse, 
has been long closed ; but they gleam yet in my fancy, 
like the white effigies on tombs in dim cathedrals, the 
marble palms pressed together on the marble breast, 
the sword by the side of the knight, the psalter by the 
side of the lady, and flowing around them the scrolls 
on which are inscribed the texts of resurrection. 

This book contains surely one of the most touching 
of human compositions — a song of Luther's. The 
great Reformer's music resounds to this day in our 
churches ; and one of the rude hymns he wrote has 
such a step of thunder in it, that the father of Fred- 
erick the Great, Mr Carlyle tells us, used to call it 
a God Almighty's Grenadier March." This one I 
speak of is of another mood, and is soft as tears. To 
appreciate it thoroughly, one must think of the burly, 
resolute, humorous, and withal tender-hearted man, 
and of the work he accomplished. He it was, the 
Franklin's kite, led by the highest hand, that went 
up into the papal thunder-cloud hanging black over 
Europe ; and the angry fire that broke upon it burned 
it not, and in roars of boltless thunder the apparition 
collapsed, and the sun of truth broke through the inky 
fragments on the nations once again. He it was who, 
when advised not to trust himself in Worms, declared, 



A Shelf in my Bookcase. 199 

" Although there be as many devils in Worms as there 
are tiles on the house-tops, I will go." He it was 
who, when brought to bay in the splendid assemblage, 
said, "It is neither safe nor prudent to do aught 
against conscience. Here stand I — I cannot do 
otherwise. God help me. Amen." The rock cannot 
move — the lightnings may splinter it. Think of these 
things,, and then read Luther's "Christmas Carol," 
with its tender inscription, "Luther — written for his 
little son Hans, 1546." Coming from another pen, 
the stanzas were perhaps not much • coming from his, 
they move one like the finest eloquence. This song 
sunk deep into the hearts of the common people, 
and is still sung from the dome of the Kreuz 
Kirche in Dresden before daybreak on Christmas 
morning. 

There is no more delightful reading in the world 
than these Scottish ballads. The mailed knight, the 
Border peel, the moonlight raid, the lady at her bower 
window — all these have disappeared from the actual 
world, and lead existence now as songs. Verses 
and snatches of these ballads are continually haunt- 
ing and twittering about my memory, as in sum- 
mer the swallows haunt and twitter about the eaves 
of my dwelling. I know them so well, and they 
meet a mortal man's experience so fully, that I am 
sure— with, perhaps, a little help from Shakspeare— 
I could conduct the whole of my business by quota- 
tion, — do all its love-making, pay all its tavern- 



200 A Shelf hi my Bookcase. 

scores, quarrel and make friends again in their words, 
far better than I could in my own. If you know 
these ballads, you will find that they mirror perfectly 
your every mood. If you are weary and down-hearted, 
behold, a verse starts to your memory trembling with 
the very sigh you have heaved. If you are merry, 
a stanza is dancing to the tune of your own mirth. If 
you love, be you ever so much a Romeo, here is 
the finest language for your using. If you hate, here 
are words which are daggers. If you like battle, 
here for two hundred years have trumpets been blow- 
ing and banners flapping. If you are dying, plentiful 
are the broken words here which have hovered on 
failing lips. Turn where you will, some fragment of 
a ballad is sure to meet you. Go into the loneliest 
places of experience and passion, and you discover 
that you are walking in human footprints. If you 
should happen to lift the first volume of Professor 
Aytoun's " Ballads of Scotland," the book of its 
own accord will open at " Clerk Saunders," and 
by that token you will guess that the ballad has 
been read and re-read a thousand times. And 
what a ballad it is! The story in parts is some- 
what perilous to deal with, but with what instinc- 
tive delicacy the whole matter is managed! Then 
what tragic pictures, what pathos, what manly and 
womanly love ! Just fancy how the sleeping lovers, 
the raised torches, and the faces of the seven bro- 



A Shelf in my Bookcase. 201 

thers looking on, would gleam on the canvas of 
Mr Millais !— 

" 'For in may come my seven bauld brothers, 
Wi' torches burning bright.' 

' ' It was about the midnight hour, 
And they were fa'en asleep, 
When in and came her seven brothers, 
And stood at her bed feet. 

"Then out and spake the first o' them, 
' We '11 awa' and let them be. ' 
Then out and spake the second o' them, 
'His father has nae mair than he.' 

' ' Then out and spake the third o' them, 
'I wot they are lovers dear.' 
Then out and spake the fourth o' them, 
' They ha'e lo'ed for mony a year.' 

"Then out and spake the fifth o' them, 
'It were sin true love to twain.' 
"Twere shame,' out spake the sixth o' them, 
' To slay a sleeping man ! ' 

"Then up and gat the seventh o' them, 
And never a word spake he, 
But he has striped his bright-brown brand 
Through Saunders's fair bodie. 

"Clerk Saunders he started, and Margaret she tum'd 
Into his arms as asleep she lay, 
And sad and silent. was the night 
That was atween thir twae." 

Could a word be- added or taken from these verses 
without spoiling the effect % You never think of the 



202 A Shelf in my Bookcase. 

language, so vividly is the picture impressed on the 
imagination. I see at this moment the sleeping pair, 
the bright-burning torches, the lowering faces of the 
brethren, and the one fiercer and darker than the 
others. 

Pass we now to the Second Part — ■ 

" Sae painfully she clam' the wa', 
She clam' the wa' up after him ; 
Hosen nor shoon upon her feet 
She had. na time to put them on. 

" ' Is there ony room at your head, Saunders? 
Is there ony room at your feet? 
Or ony room at your side, Saunders, 
Where fain, fain I wad sleep ?' " 

In that last line the very heart-strings crack. She is 
to be pitied far more than Clerk Saunders, lying stark 
with the cruel wound beneath his side, the love-kisses 
hardly cold yet upon his lips. 

It maybe said that the books of which I have been 
speaking attain to the highest literary excellence by 
favour of simplicity and unconsciousness. Neither 
the German nor the Scotsman considered himself an 
artist. The Scot sings a successful foray, in which 
perhaps he was engaged, and he sings as he fought. 
In combat he did not dream • of putting himself in a 
heroic position, or of flourishing his blade in a manner 
to be admired. A thrust of a lance would soon have 
finished him if he had. The pious German is over- 
laden with grief, or touched by some blessing into 



A Shelf in my Bookcase. 203 

sudden thankfulness, and he breaks into song as he 
laughs from gladness or groans from pain. This 
directness and naturalness give Scottish ballad and 
German hymn their highest charm. The poetic gold, 
if rough and unpolished, and with no elaborate de- 
vices carved upon it, is free at least from the .alloy of 
conceit and simulation. Modern writers might, with 
benefit to themselves, barter something of their finish 
and dexterity for that pure innocence of nature, and 
child-like simplicity and fearlessness, full of its own 
emotion, and unthinking of others or of their opinions, 
which characterise these old writings. 

The eighteenth century must ever remain the most 
brilliant and interesting period of English literary 
history. It is interesting not only on account of its 
splendour, but because it is so well known. We are 
familiar with the faces of its great men by portraits, 
and with the events of their lives by innumerable 
biographies. Every reader is acquainted with Pope's 
restless jealousy, Goldsmith's pitted countenance and 
plum-coloured coat, Johnson's surly manners and 
countless eccentricities, and with the tribe of poets 
who lived for months ignorant of clean linen, who 
were hunted by bailiffs, who smelt of stale punch, and 
who wrote descriptions of the feasts of the gods in 
twopenny cook-shops. Manners and modes of thought 
had greatly changed since the century before. Mac- 
beth, in silk stockings and scarlet coat, slew King 
Duncan, and the pit admired the wild force occasion- 



204 A Shelf in my Bookcase. 

ally exhibited by the barbarian Shakspeare. In those 
days the Muse wore patches, and sat in a sumptuous 
boudoir, and her worshippers surrounded her in high- 
heeled shoes, ruffles, and powdered wigs. When the 
poets wished to paint nature, they described Chloe 
sitting on a green bank watching her sheep, or sighing 
when Strephon confessed his flame. And yet, with all 
this apparent shallowness, the age was earnest enough 
in its way. It was a good hater. It was filled with 
relentless literary feuds. Just recall the lawless state 
of things on the Scottish Border in the olden time — 
the cattle-lifting, the house-burning, the midnight 
murders, the powerful marauders, who, safe in numer- 
ous retainers and moated keep, bade defiance to law 
— recall this state of things, and imagine the quarrels 
and raids literary, the weapons satire and wit, and you 
have a good idea of the darker aspect of the time. 
There were literary bravoes, who hired themselves to 
assassinate reputations. There were literary reavers, 
who laid desolate at a foray a whole generation of 
wits. There were literary duels, fought out in grim 
hate to the very death. It was dangerous to interfere 
f in the literary melee. Every now and then a fine 
gentleman was run through with a jest, or a foolish 
Maecenas stabbed to the heart with an epigram, and 
his foolishness settled for ever. 

As a matter of course, on this special shelf of 
books will be found Boswell's " Life of Johnson" — a 
work in our literature unique, priceless. That alto- 



A Shelf in my Bookcase. 205 

gether unvenerable yet profoundly-venerating Scottish 
gentleman, — that queerest mixture of qualities, of force 
and weakness, blindness and insight, vanity and solid 
worth, — has written the finest book of its kind which 
our nation possesses. It is quite impossible to over- 
state its worth. You lift it, and immediately the inter- 
vening years disappear, and you are in the presence 
of the Doctor. You are made free of the last century, 
as you are free of the present. You double your 
existence. The book is a letter of introduction to a 
whole knot of departed English worthies. In virtue 
of Boswell's labours, we know Johnson — the central 
man of his time — better than Burke did, or Reynolds, 
— far better even than Boswell did. We know how 
he expressed himself, in what grooves his thoughts 
ran, how he dressed, how he ate, drank, and slept. 
Boswell's unconscious art is wonderful, and so is the 
result attained. This book has arrested, as never 
book did before, time and decay. Bozzy is really 
a wizard : he makes the sun stand still. Till his 
work is done, the future stands respectfully aloof. 
Out of ever-shifting time he has made fixed and per- 
manent certain years, and in these Johnson talks and 
argues, while Burke listens, and Reynolds takes snuff, 
and Goldsmith, with hollowed hand, whispers a sly 
remark to his neighbour. There have they sat, these 
ghosts, for seventy years now, looked at and listened 
to by the passing generations ; and there they still sit, 
the one voice going on ! Smile at Boswell as we may, 



2o6 A Shelf in my Bookcase. 

he was a spiritual phenomenon quite as rare as John- 
son. More than most he deserves our gratitude. 
Let us hope that when next Heaven sends England 
a man like Johnson, a companion and listener like 
Boswell will be provided. The Literary Club sits for 
ever. What if the Mermaid were in like eternal session, 
with Shakspeare's laughter ringing through the fire and 
hail of wit ! 

By the strangest freak of chance or liking, the next 
book on my shelf contains the poems of Ebenezer 
Elliott, the Corn-law Rhymer. This volume, adorned 
by a hideous portrait in lithograph of the author, I 
can well remember picking up at a bookstall for a 
few pence many years ago. It seems curious to me 
that this man is not in these days better known. A 
more singular man has seldom existed, — seldom a 
more genuine. His first business speculation failed, 
but when about forty he commenced again, and this 
time fortune made amends for her former ill-treatment. 
His warehouse was a small, dingy place, filled with 
bars of iron, with a bust of Shakspeare looking down 
on the whole. His country-house contained busts of 
Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon. Here is a poet who 
earned a competence as an iron-merchant ; here is a 
monomaniac on the Corn-laws, who loved nature as 
intensely as ever did Burns or Wordsworth. Here is 
a John Bright uttering himself in fiery and melodious 
verse, — Apollo with iron-dust on his face, wander- 
ing among the Sheffield knife-grinders ! If you wish 



A Shelf in my Bookcase. 207 

to form some idea of the fierce discontent which 
thirty years ago existed amongst the working men 
of England, you should read the Corn-law Rhymes. 
The Corn -laws are to him the twelve plagues of 
Egypt rolled together. On account of them, he de- 
nounces his country as the Hebrew prophets were 
wont to denounce Tyre and Sidon. His rage breaks 
out into curses, which are not forgiveness. He is 
maddened by the memory of Peterloo. Never, per- 
haps, was a sane human being so tyrannised over by 
a single idea. A skeleton was found on one of the 
Derbyshire hills. Had the man been crossed in love % 
had he crept up there to die in presence of the stars % 
" Not at all," cries Elliott ; " he was a victim of the 
Corn-laws, who preferred dying on the mountain-top 
to receiving parish pay." In his wild poem all the 
evil kings in Hades descend from their thrones when 
King George enters. They only let slip the dogs of 
war ; he taxed the people's bread. " Sleep on, proud 
Britoness \" he exclaims over a woman at rest in the 
grave she had purchased. In one of his articles in 
Taifs Magazine, he seriously proposed that tragedies 
should be written shewing the evils of the Corn-laws, 
and that on a given night they should be performed 
in every theatre of the kingdom, so that the nation 
might, by the speediest possible process, be converted 
to the gospel of Free-trade. In his eyes the Corn- 
laws had gathered into their black bosoms every hu- 
man wrong ; repeal them, and lo ! the new heavens 



208 A Shelf in my Bookcase. 

and the new earth ! A poor and shallow theory of 
the universe, you will say ; but it is astonishing what 
poetry he contrives to extract out of it It is hardly 
possible, without quotation, to give an idea of the 
rage and fury which pervade these poems. He curses 
his political opponents with his whole heart and soul. 
He pillories them, and pelts them with dead cats. and 
rotten eggs. The earnestness of his mood has a 
certain terror in it for meek and quiet people. His 
poems are of the angriest, but their anger is not alto- 
gether undivine. His scorn blisters and scalds, his 
sarcasm flays \ but then outside nature is constantly 
touching him with a summer breeze or a branch of 
pink and white apple-blossom, and his mood becomes 
tenderness itself. He is far from being lachrymose ; 
and when he is pathetic, he affects one as when a 
strong man sobs. His anger is not nearly so frightful 
as his tears. I cannot understand why Elliott is so 
little read. Other names not particularly remarkable 
I meet in the current reviews — his never. His book 
stands on my shelf, but on no other have I seen 
it. This I think strange, because, apart from the in- 
trinsic value of his verse as verse, it has an histori- 
cal value. Evil times, and embittered feelings, now 
happily passed away, are preserved in his books, like 
Pompeii and Herculaneum in Vesuvian lava. He 
was a poet of the poor, but in a quite peculiar 
sense. Burns, Crabbe, Wordsworth, were poets of 
the poor, but mainly of the peasant poor. Elliott is 



A Shelf in my Bookcase. 209 

the poet of the English artizans — men who read news- 
papers and books, who are members of mechanics' 
institutes, who attend debating societies, who discuss 
political measures and political men, who are tormented 
by ideas — a very different kind of persons altogether. 
It is easier to find poetry beneath the blowing haw- 
thorn than beneath the plumes of factory or furnace 
smoke. In such uninviting atmospheres Ebenezer 
Elliott found his ; and I am amazed that the world 
does not hold it in greater regard, if for nothing else 
than for its singularity. 

There is many another book on my shelf on which 
I might dilate, but this gossiping must be drawn to a 
close. When I began, the wind was bending the 
trees, and the rain came against the window in quick, 
petulant dashes. For hours now, wind and rain have 
ceased, the trees are motionless, the garden walk is 
dry. The early light of wintry sunset is falling across 
my paper, and, as I look up, the white Dante opposite 
is dipped in tender rose. Less stern he looks, but 
not less sad, than he did in the morning. The sky is 
clear, and an arm of bleak pink vapour stretches up 
into its depths. The air is cold with frost, and the 
rain which those dark clouds in the east hold will fall 
during the night in silent, feathery flakes. When I 
wake to-morrow, the world will be changed, frosty 
forests will cover my bedroom panes, the tree branches 




210 A Shelf in my Bookcase. 

will be furred with snows ; and to the crumbs which it 
is my daily custom to sprinkle on the shrubbery walk 
will come the lineal descendant of the charitable red- 
breast that covered up with leaves the sleeping chil- 
dren in the wood. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 

/"^HAUCER is admitted on all hands to be a great 
poet, but, by the general public at least, he is not 
frequently read. He is like a cardinal virtue, a good 
deal talked about, a good deal praised, honoured by 
a vast amount of distant admiration, but with little 
practical acquaintance. And for this there are many 
and obvious reasons. He is an ancient, and the rich 
old mahogany is neglected for the new and glittering 
veneer. He is occasionally gross ; often tedious and 
obscure ; he frequently leaves a couple of lovers to cite 
the opinions of Greek and Roman authors ; and prac- 
tice and patience are required to melt the frost of his 
orthography, and let his music flow freely. In the 
conduct of his stories he is garrulous, homely, and 
slow-paced. He wrote in a leisurely world, when 
there was plenty of time for writing and reading; long 
before the advent of the printer's devil or of Mr 
Mudie. There is little of the lyrical element in him. 
He does not dazzle by sentences. He is not quotable. 
He does not shine in extracts so much as in entire 
poems. There is a pleasant equality about his writing : 



212 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

he advances through a story at an even pace, glanc- 
ing round him on everything with curious, humorous 
eyes, and having his say about everything. He 
is the prince of story-tellers, and however much he 
may move others, he is not moved himself. His 
mood is so kindly that he seems always to have 
written after dinner, or after hearing good news — 
that he had received from the king another grant 
of wine, for instance — and he discourses of love 
and lovers' raptures, and the disappointments of life, 
half sportively, half sadly, like one who has passed 
through all, felt the sweetness and the bitterness of 
it, and been able to strike a balance. He had his 
share of crosses and misfortunes, but his was a 
nature which time and sorrow could only mellow and 
sweeten ; and for all that had come and gone, he 
loved his " books clothed in black and red," to sit at 
good men's feasts; and if silent at table, as the Coun- 
tess of Pembroke reported, the "stain upon his lip 
was wine." Chaucer's face is to his writings the best 
preface and commentary; it is contented -looking, 
like one familiar with pleasant thoughts, shy and 
self-contained somewhat, as if he preferred his own 
company to the noisy and rude companionship of his 
fellows ; and the outlines are bland, fleshy, voluptuous, 
as of one who had a keen relish for the pleasures that 
leave no bitter traces. Tears and mental trouble, 
and the agonies of doubt, you cannot think of in 
connexion with it ; laughter is sheathed in it, the 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 213 

light of a smile is diffused over it. In face and turn 
of genius he differs in every respect from his successor, 
Spenser ; and in truth, in Chaucer and Spenser we 
see the fountains of the two main streams of British 
song : the one flowing through the drama and the 
humorous narrative, the other through the epic and 
the didactic poem. Chaucer rooted himself firmly 
in fact, and looked out upon the world in a half 
humorous, half melancholy mood. Spenser had but 
little knowledge of men as men; the cardinal virtues 
were the personages he was acquainted with ; in 
everything he was "high fantastical," and, as a conse- 
quence, he exhibits neither humour nor pathos. 
Chaucer was thoroughly national ; his characters, 
place them where he may — in Thebes or Tartary — 
are natives of one or other of the English shires. 
Spenser's genius was country-less as Ariel ; search ever 
so diligently, you will not find an English daisy in all 
his enchanted forests. Chaucer was tolerant of every- 
thing, the vices not excepted ; morally speaking, an 
easy-going man, he took the world as it came, and 
did not fancy himself a whit better than his fellows. 
Spenser was a Platonist, and fed his grave spirit on 
high speculations and moralities. Severe and chival- 
rous, dreaming of things to come, unsuppled by 
luxury, unenslaved by passion, somewhat scornful and 
self-sustained, it needed but a tyrannous king, an elec- 
trical political atmosphere, and a deeper interest in 
theology, to make a Puritan of him, as these things 



2 14 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

made a Puritan of Milton. The differences between 
Chaucer and Spenser are seen at a glance in their 
portraits. Chaucer's face is round, good-humoured, 
constitutionally pensive, and thoughtful. You see in 
it that he has often been amused, and that he may 
easily be amused again. Spenser's is of sharper and 
keener feature, disdainful, and breathing that severity 
which appertains to so many of the Elizabethan men. 
A fourteenth-century child, with delicate prescience, 
would have asked Chaucer to assist her in a strait, 
and would not have been disappointed. A sixteenth- 
century child in like circumstances would have 
shrunk from drawing on herself the regards of the 
sterner-looking man. We can trace the descent of 
the Chaucerian face and genius in Shakspeare and 
Scott, of the Spenserian in Milton and Wordsworth. 
In our own day, Mr Browning takes after Chaucer, 
Mr Tennyson takes after Spenser. 

Hazlitt, writing of the four great English poets, tells 
us, Chaucer's characteristic is intensity, Spenser's re- 
moteness, Milton's sublimity, and Shakspeare's every- 
thing. The sentence is epigrammatic and memor- 
able enough j but so far as Chaucer is concerned, it 
requires a little explanation. He is not intense, for 
instance, as Byron is intense, or as Wordsworth is in- 
tense. He does not see man like the one, nor nature 
like the other. He would not have cared much for 
either of these poets. And yet, so far as straight- 
forwardness in dealing with a subject, and complete 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 215 

though quiet realisation of it goes to make up in- 
tensity of poetic mood, Chaucer amply justifies his 
critic. There is no wastefulness or explosiveness 
about the old writer. He does his work silently, 
and with no appearance of effort. His poetry shines 
upon us like a May morning, but the streak over 
the eastern hill, the dew on the grass, the wind that 
bathes the brows of the wayfarer are not there by 
hap-hazard; they are the results of occult forces, a 
whole solar system has had a hand in their produc- 
tion. From the apparent ease with which an artist 
works, one does not readily give him credit for the 
mental force he is continuously putting forth. To 
many people a chaotic "Festus" is more wonderful 
than a rounded, melodious "Princess." The load 
which a strong man bears gracefully does not seem 
so heavy as the load which the weaker man staggers 
under. Incompletion is force fighting ; completion is 
force quiescent, its work done. Nature's forces are 
patent enough in some scarred volcanic moon in 
which no creature can breathe ; only the sage, in 
some soft green earth, can discover the same forces 
reft of fierceness and terror, and translated into sun- 
shine and falling dew, and the rainbow gleaming on 
the shower, It is somewhat in this way that the pro- 
priety of Hazlitt's criticism is to be vindicated. 
Chaucer is the most simple, natural, and homely of 
our poets, and whatever he attempts he does tho- 
roughly. The Wife of Bath is so distinctly limned 



2i6 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

that she could sit for her portrait. You can count 
the embroidered sprigs in the jerkin of the squire. 
You hear the pilgrims laugh as they ride to Canter- 
bury. The whole thing is admirably life-like and 
seems easy, and in the seeming easiness we are apt 
to forget the imaginative sympathy which bodies forth 
the characters, and the joy and sorrow from which 
that sympathy has drawn nurture. Unseen by us the 
ore has been dug, and smelted in secret furnaces, and 
when it is poured into perfect moulds, we are apt to 
forget by what potency the whole thing has been 
brought about. 

And, with his noticing eyes, into what a brilliant, 
many-tinted world was Chaucer born. In his day 
life had a certain breadth, colour, and picturesqueness 
which it does not possess now. It wore a braver 
dress, and flaunted more in the sun. Five centuries 
effect a great change on manners. A man may now- 
a-days, and without the slightest suspicion of the fact, 
brush clothes with half the English peerage on a 
sunny afternoon in Pall Mall. Then it was quite 
different. The fourteenth century loved magnificence 
and show. Great lords kept princely state in the 
country ; and when they came abroad, what a retinue, 
what waving of plumes, and shaking of banners, and 
glittering of rich dresses ! Religion was picturesque, 
with dignitaries and cathedrals, and fuming incense, 
and the Host carried through the streets. The 
franklin kept open house, the city merchant feasted 



Geoffrey Chaucer. ' 217 

kings, the outlaw roasted his venison beneath the 
greenwood tree. There was a gallant monarch and 
a gallant court. The eyes of the Countess of Salis- 
bury shed influence ; Maid Marian laughed in Sher- 
wood. London is already a considerable place, 
numbering, perhaps, two hundred thousand inhabit- 
ants, the houses clustering close and high along the 
river banks ; and on the beautiful April nights the 
nightingales are singing round the suburban villages 
of Strand, Holborn, and Charing. It is rich withal ; 
for after the battle of Poitiers, Harry Picard, wine- 
merchant and Lord Mayor, entertained in the city 
four kings, — to wit, Edward, king of England, John, 
king of France, David, king of Scotland, and the 
king of Cyprus, — and the last-named potentate, slightly 
heated with Harry's wine, engaged him at dice, and 
being nearly ruined thereby, the honest wine-merchant 
returned the poor king his money, which was received 
with all thankfulness. There is great stir on a sum- 
mer's morning in that Warwickshire castle — pawing of 
horses, tossing of bridles, clanking of spurs. The old 
lord climbs at last into his saddle, and rides off to 
court, his favourite falcon on his wrist, four squires in 
immediate attendance canying his arms, and be- 
hind these stretches a merry cavalcade, on which the 
chestnuts shed their milky blossoms. In the absence 
of the old peer, young Hopeful spends his time as 
befits his rank and expectations. He grooms his 
steed, plays with his hawks, feeds his hounds, and 



218 ' Geoffrey Chaucer. 

labours diligently to acquire grace and dexterity in 
the use of arms. At noon the portcullis is lowered, 
and out shoots a brilliant array of ladies and gentle- 
men, and falconers with hawks. They bend their 
course to the river, over which a rainbow is rising 
from a shower. Yonder young lady is laughing at 
our stripling squire, who seems half angry, half pleased: 
they are lovers, depend upon it. A few years, and 
the merry beauty will have become a noble, gracious 
woman, and the young fellow, sitting by a; watch-fire 
on the eve of Cressy, will wonder if she is thinking of 
him. But the river is already reached. Up flies the 
alarmed heron, his long blue legs trailing behind him ; 
a hawk is let loose ; the young lady's laugh has ceased, 
as with gloved hand shading fair forehead and sweet 
gray eye, she watches hawk and heron lessening in 
heaven. The Crusades are now over, but the religious 
fervour which inspired them lingered behind ; so that, 
even in Chaucer's day, Christian kings, when their 
consciences were oppressed by a crime more than 
usually weighty, talked of making an effort before 
they died to wrest Jerusalem and the sepulchre of 
Christ from the grasp of the infidel. England had at 
this time several holy shrines, the most famous being 
that of Thomas a Becket at Canterbury, which at- 
tracted crowds of pilgrims. The devout travelled in 
large companies ; and, in the May mornings, a merry 
sight it was, as, with infinite clatter and merriment, 
with bells, minstrels, and buffoons, they passed through 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 219 

thorp and village, bound for the tomb of St Thomas. 
The pageant of events, which seems enchantment when 
chronicled by Froissart's splendid pen, was to Chaucer 
contemporaneous incident : the chivalric richness was 
the familiar and everyday dress of his time. Into 
this princely element he was endued, and he saw 
every side of it — the frieze as well as the cloth of gold. 
In the "Canterbury Tales" the fourteenth century 
murmurs, as the sea murmurs in the pink-mouthed 
shells upon our mantelpieces. 

Of his life we do not know much. In his youth he 
studied law and disliked it — a circumstance common 
enough in the lives of men of letters, from his time 
to that of Shirley Brooks. How he lived, what he 
did, when he was a student, we are unable to dis- 
cover. Only for a moment is the curtain lifted, and 
we behold, in the old, quaint peaked and gabled Fleet 
Street of that day, Chaucer thrashing a Franciscan 
friar, (friar's offence unknown,) for which amusement 
he was next morning fined two shillings. History 
has preserved this for us, but has forgotten all the rest 
of his early life, and the chronology of all his poems. 
What curious flies are sometimes found in the historic 
amber ! On Chaucer's own authority, we know that 
he served under Eclward III. in his French campaign, 
and that he for some time lay in a French prison. 
On his return from captivity he married; he was a 
valet in the king's household ■ he was sent on an 
embassy to Genoa, and is supposed to have visited 



220 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

Petrarch, then resident at Padua, and to have heard 
from his lips the story of " Griselda,"— a tradition 
which one would like to believe. He had his share 
of the sweets and the bitters of life. He enjoyed 
offices and gifts of wine, and he felt the pangs of 
poverty and the sickness of hope deferred. He was 
comptroller of the customs for wools ; from which 
post he was dismissed — why, we know not, although 
one cannot help remembering that Edward made the 
writing out of the accounts in Chaucer's own hand 
the condition of his holding office, and having one's 
surmises. Foreign countries, strange manners, meet- 
ings with celebrated men, love of wife and children, 
and their deaths, freedom and captivity, the light of 
a king's smile and its withdrawal, furnished ample 
matter of meditation to his humane and thoughtful 
spirit. In his youth he wrote allegories, full of ladies 
and knights dwelling in impossible forests, and nursing 
impossible passions, but, in his declining years, when 
fortune had done all it could for him and all it could 
against him, he discarded these dreams, and betook 
himself to the actual stuff of human nature. Instead 
of the " Romance of the Rose," we have the " Canter- 
bury Tales," and the first great English Poet. One 
likes to fancy Chaucer in his declining days, living at 
Woodstock, with his books about him, and where he 
could watch the daisies opening themselves at sunrise, 
shutting themselves at sunset, and composing his 
wonderful stories in which the fourteenth century 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 221 

lives, — riding to battle in iron gear, hawking in em- 
broidered jerkin and waving plume, sitting in rich 
and solemn feast the monarch on the dais. 

Chaucer's early poems have music and fancy, they 
are full of a natural delight in sunshine and the green- 
ness of foliage, but they have little human interest. 
They are allegories for the most part, more or less 
satisfactorily wrought out. The allegorical turn of 
thought, the delight in pageantry, the " clothing upon" 
of abstractions with human forms, flowered originally 
out of chivalry and the feudal times. Chaucer im- 
ported it from the French, and was proud of it in his 
early poems, as a young fellow of that day might be 
proud of his horse furniture, his attire, his waving 
plume. And the poetic fashion thus set retained 
its vitality for a long while, — indeed, it was only 
thoroughly made an end of by the French Revolu- 
tion, which made an end of so much else. About 
the last trace of its influence is to be found in Burns' 
sentimental correspondence with Mrs M'Lehose, in 
which the lady is addressed as Clarinda, and the poet 
signs himself Sylvander. It was at best a mere 
beautiful gauze screen drawn between the poet and 
nature, and passion put his foot through it at once. 
After Chaucer's youth was over, he discarded some- 
what scornfully these abstractions and shows of things. 
The "Flower and the Leaf" is a beautifully-tinted 
dream ; the " Canterbury Tales" are as real as any- 
thing in Shakspeare or Burns. The ladies in the earlier 



222 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

poems dwell in forests, and wear coronals on their 
heads ; the people in the " Tales" are engaged in the 
actual concerns of life, and you can see the splashes 
of mire upon their clothes. The separate poems which 
make up the " Canterbury Tales" were probably written 
at different periods, after youth was gone, and when 
he had fallen out of love with florid imagery and 
allegorical conceits ; and we can fancy him, perhaps 
fallen on evil days and in retirement, anxious to 
gather up these loose efforts into one consummate 
whole. If of his flowers he would make a bouquet 
for posterity, it was of course necessary to procure a 
string to tie them together. These necessities, which 
ruin other men, are the fortunate chances of great 
poets. Then it was that the idea arose of a meeting 
of pilgrims at the Tabard in.Southwark, of their riding 
to Canterbury, and of the different personages relating 
stories to beguile the tedium of the journey. The 
notion was a happy one, and the execution is superb. 
In those days, as we know, pilgrimages were of frequent 
occurrence ; and in the motley group that congregated 
on such occasions, the painter of character had full 
scope. All conditions of people are comprised in the 
noisy band issuing from the courtyard of the South- 
wark inn on that May morning in the fourteenth 
century. Let us go nearer and have a look at them ! 
There is a grave and gentle knight, who has fought 
in many wars, and who has many a time hurled his 
adversary down in tournament before the eyes of all 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 223 

the ladies there, and who has taken the place of 
honour at many a mighty feast. There, riding beside 
him, is a blooming squire, his son, fresh as the month 
of May, singing day and night from very gladness of 
heart — an impetuous young fellow, who is looking 
forward to the time when he will flesh his maiden 
sword, and shout his first war-cry in a stricken field. 
There is an abbot mounted on a brown steed. He 
is middle-aged ; his bald crown shines like glass, and 
his face looks as if it were anointed with oil. He 
has been a valiant trencher-man at many a well- 
furnished feast. Above all things, he loves hunting ; 
and- when he rides, men can hear his bridle ringing in 
the whistling wind loud and clear as a chapel bell. 
There is a thin, ill-conditioned clerk, perched peril- 
ously on a steed as thin and ill-conditioned as himself. 
He will never be rich, I fear. He is a great student, 
and would rather have a few books bound in black 
and red hanging above his bed than be sheriff, of the 
xounty. There is a prioress so gentle and tender- 
hearted, that she weeps if she hears the whimper of a 
beaten hound, or sees a mouse caught in a trap. 
There rides the laughing Wife of Bath, bold-faced 
and fair. She is an adept in love-matters. Five 
husbands already "she has fried in their own grease" 
till they were glad to get into their graves to escape 
the scourge of her tongue — Heaven rest their souls, 
and swiftly send a sixth ! She wears a hat large as 
a targe or buckler, brings the artillery of her eyes to 



224 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

bear on the young squire, and jokes him about his 
sweetheart. Beside her is a worthy parson, who de- 
livers faithfully the message of his Master. Although 
he is poor, he gives away the half of his tithes in 
charity. Hi-s parish is waste and wide, yet, if sickness 
or misfortune should befall one of his flock, he rides 
in spite of wind, or rain, or thunder, to administer 
consolation. Among the crowd rides a rich franklin, 
who sits in the Guildhall on the dais. He is profuse 
and hospitable as summer. All day his table stands 
in the hall covered with meats and drinks, and every 
one who enters is welcome. There is a ship-man, 
whose beard has been shaken by many a tempest, 
whose cheek knows the kiss of the salt sea spray ; a 
merchant, with a grave look, clean and neat in his 
attire, and with plenty of gold in his purse. There is 
a doctor of physic, who has killed more men than the 
knight, talking to a clerk of laws. There is a merry 
friar, a lover of good cheer; and when seated in a 
tavern among his companions, singing songs it would 
be scarcely decorous to repeat, you may see his eyes 
twinkling in his head for joy, like stars on a frosty 
night. Beside him is a ruby-faced Sompnour, whose 
breath stinks of garlic and onions ; who is ever roaring 
for wine — strong wine, wine red as blood ; and when 
drunk, he disdains English — nothing but Latin will 
serve his turn. In front of all is a miller, who has 
been drinking over-night, and is now but indifferently 
sober. There is not a door in the country that he 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 225 

cannot break by running at it with his head. The 
pilgrims are all ready, the host gives the .word, and 
they defile through the arch. The miller blows his 
bagpipes as they issue from the town ; and away they 
ride to Canterbury, through the boon sunshine, and 
between the white hedges of the English May. 

Had Chaucer spent his whole life in seeking, he 
could not have selected a better contemporary cir- 
cumstance for securing variety of character than a 
pilgrimage to Canterbury. It comprises, as we see, 
all kinds and conditions of people. It is the four- 
teenth-century-England in little. In our time, the 
only thing that could match it in this respect is 
Epsom down on the great race-day. But then Epsom 
down is too unwieldy; the crowd is too great, and 
it does not cohere, save for the few seconds when the 
gay jackets are streaming towards the winning-post. 
The Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," in which 
we make the acquaintance of the pilgrims, is the 
ripest, most genial, and humorous — altogether the 
most masterly thing which Chaucer has left us. In 
its own way, and within its own limits, it is the most 
wonderful thing in the language. The people we 
read about are as real as the people we brush clothes 
with in the street, — nay, much more real, for we not 
only see their faces, and the fashion and texture of 
their garments, we know also what they think, how 
they express themselves, and with what eyes they 
look out on the world. Chaucer's art in this pro- 



226 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

logue is simple perfection. He indulges in no irrele- 
vant description ; he airs no fine sentiments ; he 
takes no special pains as. to style or poetic ornament ; 
but every careless touch tells, — every sly line reveals 
character; the description of each man's horse-furni- 
ture and array reads like a memoir. The nun's pretty 
oath bewrays her. We see the bold, well-favoured 
countenance of the Wife of Bath beneath her hat, as 
" broad as a buckler or a targe ;" and the horse of 
the clerk, "as lean as is a rake," tells tales of his 
master's cheer. Our modern dress is worthless as an 
indication of the character^ or even of the social rank, 
of the wearer ; in the olden time it was significant of 
personal tastes and appetites, of profession, and con- 
dition of life generally. See how Chaucer brings out 
a character by touching merely on a few points of 
attire and personal appearance : — 

"I saw his sleeves were purfil'd at the hand 
With fur, and that the finest of the land ; 
And for to fasten his hood under his chin 
He had of gold y' wrought a curious pin. 
A love-knot in the greater end there was ; 
His head was bald, and shone as any glass, 
And eke his face as if it was anoint." 

What more would you have? You could not have 
known the monk better if you had lived all your life 
in the monastery with him. The sleeves daintily 
purfiled with fur give one side of him, the curious pin 
with the love-knot another, and the shining crown and 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 227 

face complete the character and the picture. The 
sun itself could not photograph more truly. 

On their way the pilgrims tell tales, and these are 
as various as their relaters ; in fact, the Prologue is the 
soil out of which they all grow. Dramatic propriety 
is everywhere instinctively preserved. " The Knight's 
Tale" is noble, splendid, and chivalric as his own nature ; 
the tale told by the Wife of Bath is exactly what 
one would expect. With what good humour the 
rosy sinner confesses her sins ! how hilarious she is 
in her repentance ! "The Miller's Tale" is coarse and 
full-flavoured, just the kind of thing to be told by a 
rough humorous fellow who is hardly yet sober. And 
here it may be said, that although there is a good 
deal of coarseness in the " Canterbury Tales," there 
is not the slightest tinge of pruriency. There is such 
a single-heartedness and innocence in Chaucer's vul- 
garest and broadest stories, such a keen eye for hum- 
our, and such a hearty enjoyment of it, and at the 
same time such an absence of any delight in impurity 
for impurity's sake, that but little danger can arise 
from their perusal. He is so fond of fun that he will 
drink it out of a cup that is only indifferently clean, 
He writes often like Fielding, he never writes as 
Smollett sometimes does. These stories, ranging from 
the noble romance of Palamon and Arcite, to the 
rude intrigues of Clerk Nicholas — the one fitted to 
draw tears down the cheeks of noble ladies and 
gentlemen, the other to convulse with laughter the 



228 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

midriffs of illiterate clowns — give one an idea of the 
astonishing range of Chaucer's powers. He can suit 
himself to every company, make himself at home in 
every circumstance of life ; can mingle in tournaments 
where beauty is leaning from balconies, and the 
knights, with spear in rest, wait for the blast of the 
trumpet; and he can with equal ease sit with a couple 
of drunken friars in a tavern laughing over the con- 
fessions they hear, and singing questionable catches 
between whiles. Chaucer's range is wide as that of 
Shakspeare — if we omit that side of Shakspeare's 
mind which confronts the other world, and out of 
which Hamlet sprang — and his men and women are 
even more real, and more easily matched in the living 
and breathing world. For in Shakspeare's characters, 
as in his language, there is surplusage, superabundance ; 
the measure is heaped and running over. From his 
sheer wealth he is often the most ^dramatic of 
writers. He is so frequently greater than his occa- 
sion, he has so small change to suit emergencies, 
and we have guineas in place of groats. Romeo is 
more than a mortal lover, and Mercutio more than 
a mortal wit; the kings in the Shakspearian world 
are more kingly than earthly sovereigns ; Rosalind's 
laughter was never heard save in the forest of Arden. 
His madmen seem to have eaten of some "strange 
root." No such boon companion as Falstaffever heard 
chimes at midnight. His very clowns are transcen- 
dental, with scraps of wisdom springing out of their 






Geoffrey Chaucer. 229 

foolishest speech. Chaucer, lacking Shakspeare's excess 
and prodigality of genius, could not so gloriously err, 
and his creations have a harder, drier, more realistic 
look ; are more like the people we hear uttering ordi- 
nary English speech, and see on ordinary country 
roads against an ordinary English sky. If need were, 
any one of them could drive pigs to market. Chaucer's 
characters are individual enough, their idiosyncracies 
are sharply enough defined, but they are to some ex- 
tent literal and prosaic ; they are of the " earth, 
earthy;" out of his imagination no Ariel ever sprang, 
no half-human, half-brutish Caliban ever crept. He 
does not effloresce in illustrations and images, the 
flowers do not hide the grass ; his pictures are master- 
pieces, but they are portraits, and the man is brought 
out by a multiplicity of short touches — caustic, satiri- 
cal, and matter of fact. His poetry may be said to 
resemble an English country-road, on which pas- 
sengers of different degrees of rank are continually 
passing, — now knight, now boor, now abbot : Spen- 
ser's, for instance, and all the more fanciful styles, to 
a tapestry on which a whole Olympus has been 
wrought. The figures on the tapestry are much the 
more noble-looking, it is true, but then they are dreams 
and phantoms, whereas the people on the country- 
road actually exist. 

The " Knight's Tale/'— which is the first told on 
the way to Canterbury — is a chivalrous legend, full of 
hunting, battle, and tournament. Into it, although 



230 Geoffrey Chaucer, 

the scene is laid in Greece, Chaucer has, with a fine 
scorn of anachronism, poured all the splendour, colour, 
pomp, and circumstance of the fourteenth century. 
It is brilliant as a banner displayed to the sunlight. 
It is real cloth of gold. Compared with it, " Ivanhoe " 
is a spectacle at Astley's. The style is everywhere 
more adorned than is usual, although even here, and 
in the richest parts, the short, homely, caustic Chau- 
cerian line is largely employed. The " Man of Law's 
Tale," again is distinguished by quite a different merit. 
It relates the sorrows and patience of Constance, and 
is filled with the beauty of holiness. Constance might 
have been sister to Cordelia : she is one of the white 
lilies of womanhood. Her story is almost the tender- 
est in our literature. And Chaucer's art comes out 
in this, that although she would spread her hair, nay, 
put her very heart beneath the feet of those who wrong 
her, we do not cease for one moment to respect her. 
This is a feat which has but seldom been achieved. 
It has long been a matter of reproach to Mr Thack- 
eray, for instance, that the only faculty with which 
he gifts his good women is a supreme faculty of 
tears. To draw any very high degree of female. pa- 
tience is one of the most difficult of tasks. If you 
represent a woman bearing wrong with a continuous 
unmurmuring meekness, presenting to blows, come 
from what quarter they may, nothing but a bent 
neck, and eyelids humbly drooped, you are in nine 
cases out of ten painting elaborately the portrait of a 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 231 

fool ; and if you miss making her a fool, you are cer- 
tain to make her a bore. Your patient woman, in 
books and in life, does not draw on our grati- 
tude. When her goodness is not stupidity — which it 
frequently is — it is insulting. She walks about an in- 
carnate rebuke. Her silence is an incessant com- 
plaint. A tea-cup thrown at your head is not half so 
alarming as her meek, much-wronged, unretorting face. 
You begin to suspect that she consoles herself with 
the thought that there is another world where brutal 
brothers and husbands are settled with for their be- 
haviour to their angelic wives and sisters in this. 
Chaucer's Constance is neither fool nor bore, although 
in the hands of anybody else, she would have been one 
or other, or both. Like the holy religion which she 
symbolises, her sweet face draws blessing and love 
wherever it goes; it heals old wounds with its beauty, 
it carries peace into the heart of discord, it touches 
murder itself into soft and penitential tears. In 
reading the old tender-hearted poet, we feel that there 
is something in a woman's sweetness and forgiveness 
that the masculine mind cannot fathom ; and we 
adore the hushed step and still countenance of Con- 
stance almost as if an angel passed. 

Chaucer's orthography is un questionably uncouth 
at first sight ; but it is not difficult to read, if you 
keep a good glossary beside you for occasional re- 
ference, and are willing to undergo a little trouble. 
The language is antique, but it is full of antique 



232 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

flavour. Wine of excellent vintage originally, it has 
improved through all the years it has been kept. A 
very little trouble on the reader's part, in the reign of 
Anne, would have made him as intelligible as Addi- 
son ; a very little more, in the reign of Queen Victoria, 
will make him more intelligible than Mr Browning. 
Yet somehow it has been a favourite idea with many 
poets that he required modernisation, and that they 
were the men to do it. Dryden, Pope, and Words- 
worth have tried "their hands on him. Wordsworth 
performed his work in a reverential enough spirit ; but 
it may be doubted whether his efforts have brought 
the old poet a single new reader. Dryden and Pope 
did not translate or modernise Chaucer, — they com- 
mitted assault and battery upon him. They turned his 
exquisitely naive humour into their own coarseness ; 
they put doubles entendre into his mouth ; they blurred 
his female faces — as a picture is blurred when the 
hand of a Vandal is drawn over its yet wet colours — 
and they turned his natural descriptions into the 
natural descriptions of "Windsor Forest" and the 
" Fables." The grand old writer does not need 
translation or modernisation; but, perhaps, if it be 
done at all, it had better be done through the me- 
dium of prose. What is characteristic about him will 
be better reached in that way. For the benefit of 
younger readers, I subjoin short prose versions of two 
of the " Canterbury Tales "■ — a story-book than which 
the world does not possess a better. Listen, then, to 



Geoffrey Chaucer, 233 

the tale the Knight told as the pilgrims rode to 
Canterbury : — 

"There was once, as old stories tell, a certain 
Duke Theseus, lord and governor of Athens. The 
same was a great warrior and conqueror of realms. 
He defeated the Amazons, and wedded the queen 
of that country, Hypolita. After his marriage, the 
duke, his wife, and his sister Emily, with all their 
host, were riding towards Athens, when they were 
aware that a company of ladies, clad in black, were 
kneeling two by two on the highway, wringing their 
hands, and filling the air with lamentations. The 
duke, beholding this piteous sight, reined in his steed, 
and inquired the reason of their grief. Whereat one 
of the ladies, queen to the slain king Capaneus, told 
him that at the siege of Thebes, (of which town they 
were,) Creon, the conqueror, had thrown the bodies of 
their husbands in a heap, and would on no account 
allow them to be buried, so that their limbs were 
mangled by vultures and wild beasts. At the hearing 
of this great, wrong, the duke started down from his 
horse, took the ladies one by one in his arms and 
comforted them, sent Hypolita and Emily home, 
displayed his great white banner, and immediately 
rode towards Thebes with his host. Arriving at 
the city, he attacked it boldly, slew the tyrant Creon 
with his own hand, tore down the houses — wall, 
roof, and rafter, — and then gave the bodies to the 
weeping ladies that they might be honourably in- 



234 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

terred. While searching amongst the slain Thebans, 
two young knights were found grievously wounded, 
and by the richness of their armour they were known 
to be of the blood-royal. These young knights, 
Palamon and Arcite by name, the duke carried to 
Athens, and flung into perpetual prison. Here they 
lived year by year in mourning and woe. It hap- 
pened one May morning that Palamon, who by the 
clemency of his keeper was roaming about in an 
upper chamber, looked out and beheld Emily singing 
in the garden and gathering flowers. At the sight of 
the beautiful apparition he started and cried, ' Ha ! ' 
Arcite rose up, crying, ' Dear cousin, what is the 
matter 1 ?' when he too was stricken to the heart by 
the shaft of her beauty. Then the prisoners began to 
dispute as to which of them had the better right to 
love her. Palamon said that he had seen her first ; 
Arcite said that in love each man fought for himself ; 
and so they disputed day by day. Now it so hap- 
pened that at this time the Duke Perotheus came to 
visit his old playfellow and friend Theseus, and at his 
intercession Arcite was liberated on the condition 
that on pain of death he should never again be found 
in the Athenian dominions. Then the two knights 
grieved in their hearts. ' What matters liberty! ' said 
Arcite — ' I am a banished man ! Palamon in his 
dungeon is happier than I. He can see Emily, and 
be gladdened by her beauty ! ; ' Woe is me ! ' said 
Palamon, ' here must I remain in durance. Arcite is 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 235 

abroad ; he may make sharp war on the Athenian 
border, and win Emily by the sword.' When Arcite 
returned to his native city, he became so thin and 
pale with sorrow that his friends scarcely knew him. 
One night the god Mercury appeared to him in a 
dream, and told him to return to Athens, for in that 
city destiny had shaped an end of his woes. He 
arose next morning and went. He entered as a 
menial into the service of the Duke Theseus, and in a 
short time was promoted to be page of the chamber 
to Emily the bright. Meanwhile, by the help of a 
friend, Palamon, who had drugged his jailor with 
spiced wine, made his escape, and, as morning began 
to dawn, he hid himself in a grove. That very 
morning Arcite had ridden from Athens to gather 
some green branches to do honour to the month of 
May, and entered the grove in which Palamon was 
concealed. When he had gathered his green branches, 
he sat down, and, after the manner of lovers, (who 
have no constancy of spirits,) he began to pour forth 
his sorrows to the empty air. Palamon, knowing his 
voice, started up with a white face — 'False traitor, 
Arcite ! now I have found thee. Thou hast deceived 
the Duke Theseus ! I am the lover of Emily, and 
thy mortal foe ! Had I a weapon, one of us should 
never leave this grove alive ! ' 'By God, who sitteth 
above ! ; cried the fierce Arcite, ' were it not that 
thou art sick and mad for love, I would slay thee 
here with my own hand ! Meats, and drinks, and 



236 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

bedding I shall bring thee to-night, to-morrow swords 
and two suits of armour ; take thou the better, leave 
me the worse, and then let us see who can win the 
lady.' 'Agreed/ said Palamon; and Arcite rode 
away in great fierce joy of heart. Next morning, at 
the crowing of the cock, Arcite placed two suits of 
armour before him on his horse, and rode toward the 
grove. When they met, the colour of their faces 
changed. Each thought, ' Here comes my mortal 
enemy ; one of us must be dead.' Then friend-like, 
as if they had been brothers, they assisted each the 
other to rivet on the armour; that done, the great 
bright swords went to and fro, and they were soon 
standing ankle-deep in blood. That same morning 
the Duke Theseus, his wife, and Emily, went forth to 
hunt the hart with hound and horn, and, as destiny 
ordered it, the chase led them to the very grove in 
which the knights were fighting. Theseus, shading 
his eyes from the sunlight with his hand, saw them, 
and, spurring his horse between them, cried, c What 
manner of men are ye, fighting here without judge or 
officer?' Whereupon Palamon said, ' I am that Pala- 
mon who has broken your prison ; this is Arcite the 
banished man, who, by returning to Athens, has for- 
feited his head. Do with us as you list. I have no 
more to say.' ' You have condemned yourselves ! ' 
cried the Duke ; ' by mighty Mars the red, both of 
you shall die ! ' Then Emily and the queen fell at 
his feet, and with prayers and tears and white hands 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 237 

lifted up besought the lives of the young knights, 
which was soon granted. Theseus began to laugh 
when he thought of his own young days. ' What a 
mighty god is Love ! ' quoth he. 'Here are Palamon 
and Arcite fighting for my sister, while they know she 
can only marry one. Fight they ever so much, she 
cannot marry both. I therefore ordain that both of 
you go away and return this day year, each bringing 
with him a hundred knights, and let the victor in 
solemn tournament have Emily for wife.' Who was 
glad now but Palamon ! who sprang up for joy but 
Arcite ! 

" When the twelve months had nearly passed away, 
there was in Athens a great noise of workmen and 
hammers. The Duke was busy with preparations. 
He built a large amphitheatre, seated round and 
round, to hold thousands of people. He erected also 
three temples — one for Diana, one for Mars, one for 
Venus ; how rich these were, how full of paintings 
and images, the tongue cannot tell ! Never was such 
preparation made in the world. At last the day ar- 
rived in which the knights were to make their entrance 
into the city. A noise of trumpets was heard, and 
through the city rode Palamon and his train. With 
him came Lycurgus, the King of Thrace. He stood 
in a great car of gold, drawn by four white bulls, and 
his face was like a griffin when he looked about. 
Twenty or more hounds used for hunting the lion 
and the bear ran about the wheels of his car ; at his 



238 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

back rode a hundred lords, stern and stout. Another 
burst of trumpets, and Arcite entered with his troop. 
By his side rode Emetrius, the King of India, on a 
ba} 7 steed covered with cloth of gold. His hair was 
yellow, and glittered like the sun; when he looked upon 
the people, they thought his face was like the face of 
a lion ; his voice was like the thunder of a trumpet. 
He bore a white eagle on his wrist, and tame lions 
and leopards ran among the horses of his train. They 
came to the city on a Sunday morning, and the jousts 
were to begin on Monday. What pricking of squires 
backwards and forwards, what clanking of hammers, 
what baying of hounds, that day ! At last it was 
noon of Monday. Theseus declared from his throne 
that no blood was to be shed — that they should take 
prisoners only, and that he who was once taken 
prisoner should on no account again mingle in the 
fray. Then the Duke, the Queen, Emily, and the 
rest, rode to the lists with trumpets and melody. 
They had ho sooner taken their places than through 
the gate of Mars rode Arcite and his hundred, dis- 
playing a red banner. At the self-same moment 
Palamon and his company entered by the gate of 
Venus, with a banner white as milk. They were 
then arranged in two ranks, their names were called 
over, the gates were shut, the herald gave his cry, 
loud and clear rang the trumpet, and crash went the 
spears as if made of glass when the knights met in 
battle shock. There might you see a knight un- 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 239 

horsed, a second crushing his way through the press, 
armed with a mighty mace, a third hurt and taken 
prisoner. Many a time that day in the swaying battle 
did the two Thebans meet, and thrice were they un- 
horsed. At last, near the setting of the sun, when 
Palamon was fighting with Arcite, he was wounded 
by Emetrius, and the battle thickened at the place. 
Emetrius is thrown out of his saddle a spear's length. 
Lycurgus is overthrown, and rolls on the ground, 
horse and man; and Palamon is dragged by main 
force to the stake. Then Theseus rose up where he 
sat, and cried, ' Ho ! no more ; Arcite of Thebes 
hath won Emily!' at which the people shouted so 
loudly, that it almost seemed the mighty lists would 
fall. Arcite now put up his helmet, and, curvetting 
his horse through the open space, smiled to Emily, 
when a fire from Pluto started out of the earth ; 
the horse shied, and his rider was thrown on his 
head on the ground. When he was lifted, his breast 
was broken, . and his face was as black as coal. 
Then there was grief in Athens — every one wept. 
Soon after, Arcite, feeling the cold death creeping 
up from his feet and darkening his face and eyes, 
called Palamon and Emily to his bed-side, when he 
joined their hands, and died. The dead body was 
laid on a pile, dressed in splendid war-gear, his 
naked sword was placed by his side, the pile was 
heaped with gums, frankincense, and odours ; a torch 
was applied, and when the flames rose up, and the 



240 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

smoky fragrance rolled to heaven, the Greeks galloped 
round three times, with a great shouting and clashing 
of shields." 

The Man of Law's tale runs in this wise : — 
"There dwelt in Syria once a company of merchants, 
who scented every land with their spices. They dealt 
in jewels, and cloth of gold, and sheeny satins. It so 
happened, that while some of them were dwelling in 
Rome for traffic, the people talked of nothing save 
the wonderful beauty of Constance, the daughter of 
the emperor. She was so fair, that every one who 
looked upon her face fell in love with her. In a short 
time the ships of the merchants, laden with rich wares, 
were furrowing the green sea going home. When 
they came to their native city, they could talk of 
nothing but the marvellous beauty of Constance. 
Their words being reported to the Sultan, he deter- 
mined that none other should be his wife ; and for 
this purpose he abandoned the religion of the false 
Prophet, and was baptized in the Christian faith. 
Ambassadors passed between the courts, and the day 
came at length when Constance was to leave Rome for 
her husband's palace in Syria. What kisses and tears 
and lingering embraces ! What blessings on the little 
golden head which was so soon to lie in the bosom 
of a stranger ! What state and solemnity in the pro- 
cession which wound down from the shore to the 
ship ! At last it was Syria. Crowds of people were 
standing on the beach. The mother of the Sultan 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 241 

was there ; and when Constance stepped ashore, she 
took her in her arms and kissed her as if she had 
been her own child. Soon after, with trumpets and 
melody, and the trampling of innumerable horses, the 
Sultan came. Everything was joy and happiness. 
But the smiling demoness, his mother, could not for- 
give him for changing his faith, and she resolved to 
slay him that very night, and seize the government of 
the kingdom. He and all his lords were stabbed in 
the rich hall while they were sitting at their wine. 
Constance alone escaped. She was then put into a 
ship alone, with food and clothes, and told that she 
might find her way back to Italy. She sailed away, 
and was never seen by that people. For five years 
she wandered to and fro upon the sea. Do you ask 
who preserved her 1 ? The same God who fed Elijah 
with ravens, and saved Daniel in the horrible den. 
At last she floated into the English seas, and was 
thrown by the waves on the Northumberland shore, 
near which stood a great castle. The constable of 
the castle came down in the morning to see the woful 
woman. She spoke a kind of corrupt Latin, and 
could neither tell her name nor the name of the 
country of which she was a native. She said she was 
so bewildered in the sea that she remembered nothing. 
The man could not help loving her, and so took her 
home to live with himself and his wife. Now, through 
the example and teaching of Constance, Dame Hermi- 
gild was converted to Christianity. It happened also 
Q 



242 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

that three aged Christian Britons were living near that 
place in great fear of their pagan neighbours, and one 
of these men was blind. One day, as the constable, 
his wife, and Constance were walking along the sea- 
shore, they were met by the blind man, who called 
out, ' In the name of Christ, give me my sight, Dame 
Hermigild ! ; At this, on account of her husband, 
she was sore afraid, but, encouraged by Constance, 
she wrought a great miracle, and gave the blind man 
his sight. But Satan, the enemy of all, wanted to 
destroy Constance, and he employed a young knight 
for that purpose. This knight had loved her with a 
foul affection, to which she could give no return. 
At last, wild for revenge, he crept at night into Her- 
migild' s chamber, slew her, and laid the bloody knife 
on the innocent pillow of Constance. The next 
morning there was woe and dolour in the house. She 
was brought before Alia, the king, charged with the 
murder. The people could not believe that she had 
done this thing — they knew she loved Hermigild so. 
Constance fell down on her knees and prayed to God 
for succour. Have you ever been in a crowd in 
which a man is being led to death, and, seeing a 
wild, pale face, know by that sign that you are look- 
ing upon the doomed creature? — so wild, so pale 
looked Constance when she stood before the king 
and people. The tears ran down Alla's face. ' Go 
fetch a book/ cried he ; \ and if this knight swears 
that the woman is guilty, she shall surely die/ The 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 243 

book was brought, the knight took the oath, and that 
moment an unseen hand smote him on the neck, so 
that he fell down on the floor, his eyes bursting out 
of his head. Then a celestial voice was heard in the 
midst, crying, 'Thou hast slandered a daughter of 
Holy Church in high presence, and yet I hold my 
peace/ A great awe fell on all who heard, and the 
king and multitudes of his people were converted. 
Shortly after this, Alia wedded Constance with great 
richness and solemnity. At length he was called to 
defend his border against the predatory Scots, and in 
his absence a man-child was born. A messenger was 
sent with the blissful tidings to the king's camp ; but, 
on his way, the messenger turned aside to the dwell- 
ing of Donegild, the king's mother, and said, 'Be 
blithe, madam ; the queen has given birth to a son, 
and joy is in the land. Here is the letter I bear to 
the king.' The wicked Donegild said, 'You must 
be already tired — here are refreshments.' And while 
the simple man drank ale and wine, she forged a letter, 
saying that the queen had been delivered of a creature 
so fiendish and horrible, that no one in the castle could 
bear to look upon it. This letter the messenger gave 
to the king, and who can tell his grief! But he wrote 
in reply, ' Welcome be the child that Christ sends ! 
Welcome, O Lord, be Thy pleasure ! Be careful of 
my wife and child till my return.' The messenger 
on his return slept at Donegild's court, with the letter 
under his girdle. It was stolen while in his drunken 



244 Geoffrey Chaucer. 

sleep, and another put in its place, charging the con- 
stable not to let Constance remain three days in the 
kingdom, but to send her and her child away in the 
same ship in which she had come. The constable 
could not help himself. Thousands are gathered on 
the shore. With a face wild and pale as when she 
came from the sea, and bearing her crying infant in 
her arms, she comes through the crowd, which shrinks 
back, leaving a lane for her sorrow. She takes her 
seat in the little boat; and while the cruel people 
gaze hour by hour from the shore, she passes into the 
sunset, and away out into the night under the stars. 
When Alia returned from the war, and found how he 
had been deceived, he slew his mother in the bitter- 
ness of his heart. 

News had come to Rome of the cruelty of the Sul- 
tan's mother to Constance, and an army was sent to 
waste her country. After the land had been burned 
and desolated, the commander was crossing the seas 
in triumph, when he met the ship sailing in which sat 
Constance and her little boy. They were both 
brought to Rome, and although the commander's wife 
and Constance were cousins, the one did not know 
the other. By this time, remorse for the slaying of 
his mother had seized Alla's mind, and he could find 
no rest. He resolved to make a pilgrimage to Rome 
in search of peace. He crossed the Alps with his 
train, and entered the city with great glory and mag- 
nificence. One day he feasted at the commander's 



Geoffrey Chaucer. 245 

house, at which Constance dwelt ; and at her request 
her little son was admitted, and during the progress 
of the feast the child went and stood looking in the 
king's face. 'What fair child is that standing yon- 
der V said the king. 'By St John, I know not!' 
quoth the commander ; 'he has a mother, but no 
father, that I know of. 5 And then he told the king — ■ 
who seemed all the while like a man stunned — how 
he had found the mother and child floating about on 
the sea. The king rose from the table and sent for 
Constance, and when he saw her and thought on all 
her wrongs, he could not refrain from tears. ' This is 
your little son, Maurice/ she said, as she led him in 
by the hand. Next day she met the emperor her 
father in the street, and falling down on her knees 
before him, said, 'Father, has the remembrance of 
your young child Constance gone out of your mind 1 
I am that Constance, whom you sent to Syria, and 
who was thought to be lost in the sea.' That day 
there was great joy in Rome ; and soon afterwards, 
Alia, with his wife and child, returned to England, 
where they lived in great prosperity till he died." 



BOOKS AND GARDENS. 

IV/rOST men seek solitude from wounded vanity, 
from disappointed ambition, from a miscarriage 
in the passions ; but some others from native instinct, 
as a duckling seeks water. I have taken to my soli- 
tude, such as it is, from an indolent turn of mind ; 
and this solitude I sweeten by an imaginative sym- 
pathy which recreates the past for me — the past of 
the world, as well as the past which belongs to me as 
an individual — and which makes me independent of 
the passing moment. I see every one struggling after 
the unattainable, but I struggle not, and so spare my- 
self the pangs of disappointment and disgust. I have 
no ventures at sea, and, consequently, do not fear the 
arrival of evil tidings. I have no desire to act any 
prominent part in the world, but I am devoured by 
an unappeasable curiosity as to the men who do act. 
I am not an actor, I am a spectator only. My sole 
occupation is sight-seeing. In a certain imperial idle- 
ness, I amuse myself with the world. Ambition! 
What do I care for ambition % The oyster with much 
pain produces its pearl. I take the pearl. Why 



Books and Gardens. 247 

should I produce 'one after this miserable, painful 
fashion 1 ? It would be but a flawed one at best. 
These pearls I can pick up by the dozen. The pro- 
duction of them is going on all around me, and there 
will be a nice crop for the solitary man of the next 
century. Look at a certain silent emperor, for in- 
stance; a hundred years hence his pearl will be 
handed about from hand to hand ; will be curiously 
scrutinised and valued ; will be set in its place in the 
world's cabinet. I confess I should like to see the 
completion of that filmy orb. Will it be pure in 
colour'? Will its purity be marred by an ominous 
bloody streak? Of this I am certain, that in the 
cabinet in which the world keeps these peculiar trea- 
sures, no one will be looked at more frequently, or 
will provoke a greater variety of opinions as to its 
intrinsic worth. Why should I be ambitious 1 Shall 
I write verses 1 I am not likely to surpass Mr Tenny- 
son or Mr Browning in that walk. Shall I be a 
musician 1 The blackbird singing this moment some- 
where in my garden-shrubbery puts me to instant 
shame. Shall I paint 1 The intensest scarlet on an 
artist's palette is but ochre to that I saw this morning 
at sunrise. No, no ; let me enjoy Mr Tennyson's 
verse, and the blackbird's song, and the colours of sun- 
rise, but do not let me emulate them. I am happier 
as it is. I do not need to make history — there are 
plenty of people willing to save me trouble on that 
score. The cook makes the dinner, the guest eats it, 



248 Books and Gardens. 

and the last, not without reason, is considered the 
happier man. 

In my garden I spend my days • in my library I 
spend my nights. My interests are divided between 
my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am 
in the present ; with the book I am in the past. I go 
into my library, and all history unrolls before me. 
I breathe the morning air of the world while the 
scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it 
vibrated only to the world's first brood of night- 
ingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyra- 
mids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies 
of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the 
march of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre, — the 
stage is time, the play is the play of the world. 
What a spectacle it is ! What kingly pomp, what 
processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what 
crowds of captives are dragged at the chariot-wheels 
of conquerors ! I hear or cry " Bravo " when the 
great actors come on shaking the stage. I am a 
Roman emperor when I look at a Roman, coin. I 
lift Homer, and I shout with Achilles in the trenches. 
The silence of the unpeopled Syrian plains, the out- 
comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham 
and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at even-tide, Rebekah 
at the well, Jacob's guile, Esau's face reddened by 
desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid funeral procession 
— all these things I find within the boards of my Old 
Testament. What a silence in those old books as of 



Books and Gardens. 249 

a half-peopled world — what bleating of flocks — what 
green pastoral rest — what indubitable human exist- 
ence ! Across brawling centuries of blood and war, I 
hear the bleating of Abraham's flocks, the tinkling of 
the bells of Rebekah's camels. O men and women, 
so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so well- 
known, by what miraculous power do I know ye all ! 
Books are the true Elysian fields where the spirits of 
the dead converse, and into these fields a mortal may 
venture unappalled. What king's court can boast 
such company? What school of philosophy such 
wisdom % The wit of the ancient world is glancing 
and flashing there. There is Pan's pipe, there are 
the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night, 
and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am 
occasionally visited by a strange sense of the super- 
natural. They are not collections of printed pages, 
they are ghosts. I take one down and it speaks with 
me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men 
and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I 
call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I mis- 
apply the term. No man sees more company than I 
do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than 
ever did Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery 
marches. I am a sovereign in my library, but it is 
the dead, not the living that attend my levees. 

The house I dwell in stands apart from the little 
town, and relates itself to the houses as I do to the 
inhabitants. It sees everything, but is itself unseen, 



250 Books and Gardens 

or, at all events, unregarded. My study-window looks 
down upon Dreamthorp like a meditative eye. With- 
out meaning it, I feel I am a spy on the ongoings of 
the quiet place. Around my house there is an old- 
fashioned rambling garden, with close-shaven grassy 
plots, and fantastically-clipped yews, which have 
gathered their darkness from a hundred summers and 
winters ; and sun-dials, in which the sun is constantly 
telling his age ; and statues, green with neglect and 
the stains of the weather. The garden I love more 
than any place on earth ; it is a better study than 
the room inside the house which is dignified by 
that name. I like to pace its gravelled walks, to 
sit in the moss-house, which is warm and cozy as 
a bird's nest, and wherein twilight dwells at noon- 
day ; to enjoy the feast of colour spread for me in 
the curiously-shaped floral spaces. My garden, with 
its silence and the pulses of fragrance that come and 
go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet 
music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me 
wistfully through the bars. Among my flowers and 
trees nature takes me into her own hands, and I 
breathe freely as the first man. It is curious, pathetic 
almost, I sometimes think, how deeply seated in the 
human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening. 
The sickly seamstress in the narrow city lane tends 
her box of sicklier mignonette. The retired merchant 
is as fond of tulips as ever was Dutchman during the 
famous mania. The author finds a garden the best 



Books and Gardens. 251 

place to think out his thought. In the disabled 
statesman every restless throb of regret or ambition 
is stilled when he looks upon his blossomed apple- 
trees. Is the fancy too far brought, that this love for 
gardens is a reminiscence haunting the race of that 
remote time in the world's dawn when but two per- 
sons existed — a gardener named Adam, and a gar- 
dener's wife called Eve % 

When I walk out of my house into my garden I 
walk out of my habitual self, my every-day thoughts, 
my customariness of joy or sorrow by which I re- 
cognise and assure myself of my own identity. These 
I leave behind me for a time as the bather leaves his 
garments on the beach. This piece of garden-ground, 
in extent barely a square acre, is a kingdom with its 
own interests, annals, and incidents. Something is 
always happening in it. To day is always different 
from yesterday. This spring a chaffinch built a nest 
in one of my yew-trees. The particular yew which 
the bird did me the honour to select had been clipped 
long ago into a similitude of Adam, and, in fact, went 
by his name. The resemblance to a human figure 
was, of course, remote, but the intention was evident. 
In the black shock head of our first parent did the 
birds establish their habitation. A prettier, rounder, 
more comfortable nest I never saw, and many a wild 
swing it got when Adam bent his back, and bobbed 
and shook his head when the bitter east wind was 
blowing. The nest interested me, and I visited it 



252 Books and Gardens, 

every day from the time that the first stained turquoise 
sphere was laid in the warm lining of moss and horse- 
hair, till, when I chirped, four red hungry throats, 
eager for worm or slug, opened out of a confused 
mass of feathery down. What a hungry brood it 
was, to be sure, and how often father and mother 
were put to it to provide them sustenance ! I went 
but the other day to have a peep, and, behold, brood 
and parent-birds were gone, the nest was empty, 
Adam's visitors had departed. In the corners of 
my bedroom window I have a couple of swallows' 
nests, and nothing can be pleasanter in these summer 
mornings than to lie in a kind of half-dream, con- 
scious all the time of the chatterings and endearments 
of the man-loving creatures. They are beautifully rest- 
less, and are continually darting around their nests 
in the window-corners. All at once there is a great 
twittering and noise ; something of moment has been 
witnessed, something of importance has occurred in 
swallow-world, perhaps a fly of unusual size or savour 
has been bolted. Clinging with their feet, and with 
heads turned charmingly aside, they chatter away with 
voluble sweetness, then with a gleam of silver they 
are gone, and in a trice one is poising itself in the 
wind above my tree-tops, while the other dips her 
wing as she darts after a fly through the arches of the 
bridge which lets the slow stream down to the sea. 
I go to the southern wall, against which I have 
trained my fruit-trees, and find it a sheet of white 



Books and Gardens. ■ 253 

and vermeil blossom, and as I know it by heart, I 
can notice what changes take place on it day by day, 
what later clumps of buds have burst into colour and 
odour. What beauty in that blooming wall — the 
wedding-presents of a princess ranged for admiration 
would not please me half so much; what delicate 
colouring, what fragrance the thievish winds steal 
from it without making it one odour the poorer, with 
what a complacent hum the bee goes past. My 
chaffinch's nest, my swallows — twittering but a few 
months ago around the kraal of the Hottentot, or 
chasing flies around the six solitary pillars of Baalbec — 
with their nests in the corners of my bed-room win- 
dows, my long- armed fruit-trees flowering against my 
sunny wall are not mighty pleasures, but then they 
are my own, and I have not to go in search of them. 
And so, like a wise man, I am content with what I 
have, and make it richer by my fancy, which is as 
cheap as sunlight, and gilds objects quite as prettily. 
It is the coins in my own pocket, not the coins in the 
pockets of my neighbour that are of use to me. Dis- 
content has never a doit in her purse, and envy is 
the most poverty-stricken of the passions. 

His own children, and the children he happens to 
meet on the country road, a man regards with quite 
different eyes. The strange, sunburnt brats returning 
from a primrose-hunt and laden with floral spoils, 
may be as healthy-looking, as pretty, as well-behaved, 
as sweet-tempered, as neatly-dressed as those that 



254 Books and Gardens. 

bear his name, — may be in every respect as worthy of 
love and admiration, but then they have the misfor- 
tune not to belong to him. That little fact makes a 
great difference. He knows nothing about them, — his 
acquaintance with them is born and dead in a mo- 
ment. I like my garden better than any other gar- 
den for the same reason. It is my own. And owner- 
ship in such a matter implies a great deal. When I 
first settled here, the ground around the house was 
sour moorland. I made the walk, planted the trees, 
built the moss-house, erected the sun-dial, brought 
home the rhododendrons and fed them with the 
mould which they love so well. I am the creator of 
every blossom, of every odour that comes and goes in 
the wind. The rustle of my trees is to my ear what 
his child's voice is to my friends the village doctor 
or the village clergyman. I know the genealogy of 
every tree and plant in my garden. I watch their 
growth as a father watches the growth of his children. 
It is curious enough, as shewing from what sources 
objects derive their importance, that if you have once 
planted a tree for other than mere commercial pur- 
poses, — and in that case it is usually done by your 
orders and by the hands of hirelings, — you have 
always in it a quite peculiar interest. You care 
more for it than you care for all the forests of 
Norway or America. You have planted it, and that 
is sufficient to make it peculiar amongst the trees of 
the world. This personal interest I take in every 



Books and Gardens. 255 

inmate of my garden, and this interest I have in- 
creased by sedulous watching. But really trees and 
plants resemble human beings in many ways. You 
shake a packet of seed into your forcing-frame, and 
while some grow, others pine and die, or struggle on 
under hereditary defect, shewing indifferent blossoms 
late in the season, and succumb at length. So far as 
one could discover, the seeds were originally alike, — 
they received the same care, they were fed by the 
same moisture and sunlight, but of no two of them are 
the issues the same. Do I not see something of this 
kind in the world of men, and can I not please my- 
self with quaint analogies? These plants and trees 
have their seasons of illness, and their sudden deaths. 
Your best rose-tree, whose fame has spread for twenty 
miles, is smitten by some fell disease ; its leaves take 
an unhealthy hue, and in a day or so it is sapless — • 
dead. A tree of mine, the first last spring to put out 
its leaves, and which wore them till November, made 
this spring no green response to the call of the sun- 
shine. Marvelling what ailed it, I went to examine, 
and found it had been dead for months — and yet 
during the winter there had. been no frost to speak of, 
and more than its brothers and sisters it was in no 
way exposed. These are the tragedies of the garden, 
and they shadow forth other tragedies nearer us. In 
everything we find a kind of dim mirror of ourselves. 
Sterne, if placed in a desert, said he would love a 
tree ; and I can fancy such a love would not be alto- 



256 Books and Gardens. 

gether unsatisfying. Love of trees and plants is safe. 
You do not run risk in your affections. They are my 
children, silent and beautiful, untouched by any pas- 
sion, unpolluted by evil tempers ; for me they leaf 
and flower themselves. In autumn they put off their 
rich apparel, but next year they are back again with 
dresses fair as ever ; and — one can extract a kind of 
fanciful bitterness from the thought — should I be laid 
in my grave in winter, they would all in spring be 
back again with faces as bright and with breaths as 
sweet, missing me not at all. Ungrateful, the one I 
am fondest of would blossom very prettily if planted 
on the soil that covers me — where my dog would 
die, where my best friend would perhaps raise an in- 
scription ! 

I like flowering plants, but I like trees more, for 
the reason, I suppose, that they are slower in coming 
to maturity, are longer-lived, that you can become 
better acquainted with them, and that in the course of 
years memories and associations hang as thickly on 
their boughs as do leaves in summer or fruits in 
autumn. I do not wonder that great earls value their 
trees, and never, save in direst extremity, lift upon 
them the axe. Ancient descent and glory are made 
audible in the proud murmur of immemorial woods. 
There are forests in England whose leafy noises may 
be shaped into Agincourt and the names of the battle- 
fields of the Roses ; oaks that dropped their acorns in 
the year that Henry VIII. held his field of the Cloth of 



Books and Gardens. 257 

Gold, and beeches that gave shelter to the deer when 
Shakspeare was a boy. There they stand, in sun and 
shower, the broad-armed witnesses of perished cen- 
turies ; and sore must his need be who commands a 
woodland massacre. A great English tree, the rings 
of a century in its boll, is one of the noblest of natu- 
ral objects ; and it touches the imagination no less 
than the eye, for it grows out of tradition and a past 
order of things, and is pathetic with the suggestions 
of dead generations. Trees waving a colony of rooks 
in the wind to-day, are older than historic lines. 
Trees are your best antiques. There are cedars on 
Lebanon which the axes of Solomon spared, they say, 
when he was busy with his Temple ; there are olives 
on Olivet that might have rustled in the ears of the 
Master and the Twelve ; there are oaks in Sher- 
wood, which have tingled to the horn of Robin- 
hood, and have listened to Maid Marion's laugh. 
Think of an existing Syrian cedar which is nearly 
as old as history, which was middle-aged before the 
wolf suckled Romulus; think of an existing Eng- 
lish elm in whose branches the heron was reared 
which the hawks of Saxon Harold killed ! If you 
are a notable, and wish to be remembered, better 
plant a tree than build a city or strike a medal — it 
will outlast both. 

My trees are young enough, and if they do not 
take me away into the past, they project me into the 
future. When I planted them, I knew I was perform- 



258 Books and Gardens. 

ing an act, the issues of which would outlast me long. 
My oaks are but saplings ; but what undreamed-of 
English kings will they not outlive 1 ? I pluck my 
apples, my pears, my plums ; and I know that from 
the same branches other hands will pluck apples, 
pears, and plums when this body of mine will have 
shrunk into a pinch of dust. I cannot dream with 
what year these hands will date their letters. A man 
does not plant a tree for himself, he plants it for 
posterity. And sitting idly in the sunshine, I think 
at times of the unborn people who will, to some 
small extent, be indebted to me. Remember me 
kindly, ye future men and women ! When I am 
dead, the juice of my apples will foam and spirt in 
your cider presses, my plums will gather for you their 
misty bloom ; and that any of your youngsters should 
be choked by one of my cherry-stones, merciful 
Heaven forfend ! 

In this pleasant summer weather I hold my audi- 
ence in my garden rather than in my house. In all 
my interviews the sun is a third party. Every village 
has its Fool, and, of course, Dreamthorp is not without 
one. Him I get to run my messages for me, and he 
occasionally turns my garden borders with a neat 
hand enough. He and I hold frequent converse, and 
people here, I have been told, think we have certain 
points of sympathy. Although this is not meant for 
a compliment, I take it for one. The poor, faithful 
creature's brain has strange visitors : now 'tis fun, now 



Books and Gardens. 259 

wisdom, and now something which seems in the 
queerest way a compound of both. He lives in a 
kind of twilight which observes objects, and his re- 
marks seem to come from another world than that in 
which ordinary people live. He is the only original 
person of my acquaintance ; his views of life are 
his own, and form a singular commentary on those 
generally accepted. He is dull enough at times, 
poor fellow ; but anon he startles you with something, 
and you think he must have wandered out of Shak- 
speare's plays into this out-of-the-way place. Up 
from the village now and then comes to visit me the 
tall, gaunt, atrabilious confectioner, who has a hanker- 
ing after Red-republicanism, and the destruction of 
Queen, Lords, and Commons. Guy Fawkes is, I 
believe, the only martyr in his calendar. The sourest 
tempered man, I think, that ever engaged in the 
manufacture of sweetmeats. I wonder that the oddity 
of the thing never strikes himself. To be at all con- 
sistent, he should put poison in his lozenges, and 
become the Herod of the village innocents. One of 
his many eccentricities is a love for flowers, and he 
visits me often to have a look at my greenhouse and 
my borders. I listen to his truculent and revolu- 
tionary speeehes, and take my revenge by sending 
the gloomy egotist away with a nosegay in his hand, 
and a gay-coloured flower stuck in a button hole. 
He goes quite unconscious of my floral satire. 

The village clergyman and the village doctor are 



260 Books and Gardens. 

great friends of mine ; they come to visit me often, 
and smoke a pipe with me in my garden. The twain 
love and respect each other, but they regard the 
world from different points of view, and I am now 
and again made witness of a good-humoured passage 
of arms. The clergyman is old, unmarried, and a 
humorist. His sallies and his gentle eccentricities 
seldom provoke laughter, but they are continually 
awakening the pleasantest smiles. Perhaps what he 
has seen of the world, its sins, its sorrows, its death- 
beds, its widows and orphans, has tamed his spirit, 
and put a tenderness into his wit. I do not think I 
have ever encountered a man who so adorns his 
sacred profession. His pious, devout nature pro- 
duces sermons just as naturally as my apple-trees 
produce apples. He is a tree that flowers every 
Sunday. Very beautiful in his reverence for the 
Book, his trust in it ; through long acquaintance, its 
ideas have come to colour his entire thought, and 
you come upon its phrases in his ordinary speech. 
He is more himself in the pulpit than anywhere else, 
and you get nearer him in his sermons than you do 
sitting with him at his tea-table, or walking with him 
on the country roads. He does not feel confined in 
his orthodoxy; in it he is free as a bird in the air. 
The doctor is, I conceive, as good a Christian as the 
clergyman, but he is impatient of pale or limit ; he 
never comes to a fence without feeling a desire to get 
over it. He is a great hunter of insects, and he 



Books and Gardens, 261 

thinks that the wings of his butterflies might yield 
very excellent texts ; he is fond of geology, and can- 
not, especially when he is in the company of the 
clergyman, resist the temptation of hurling a fossil at 
Moses. He wears his scepticism as a coquette wears 
her ribbons, — to annoy if he cannot subdue, — and 
when his purpose is served, he puts his scepticism 
aside — as the coquette puts her ribbons. Great argu- 
ments arise between them, and the doctor loses his 
field through his loss of temper, which, however, he re- 
gains before any harm is done. For the worthy man is 
irascible withal, and opposition draws fire from him. 

After an outburst, there is a truce between the 
friends for a while, till it is broken by theological 
Dattle over the age of the world, or some other the 
like remote matter, which seems important to me 
only in so far as it affords ground for disputa- 
tion. These truces are broken sometimes by the 
doctor, sometimes by the clergyman. T ; other even- 
ing the doctor and myself were sitting in the garden, 
smoking each a meditative pipe. Dreamthorp lay 
below, with its old castle and its lake, and its hundred 
wreaths of smoke floating upward into the sunset. 
Where we sat the voices of children playing in the 
street could hardly reach us. Suddenly a step was 
heard on the gravel, and the next moment the clergy- 
man appeared, as it seemed to me, with a peculiar 
airiness of aspect, and the light of a humorous satis- 
faction in his eye. After the usual salutations he 



262 Books and Gardens. 

took his seat beside us, lifted a pipe of the kind 
called "church-warden" from the box on the ground, 
filled and lighted it, and for a little while we were 
silent all three. The clergyman then drew an old 
magazine from his side pocket, opened it at a place 
where the leaf had been carefully turned down, and 
drew my attention to a short poem, which had for its 
title, " Vanity Fair,' ; imprinted in German text. This 
poem he desired me to read aloud. Laying down 
my pipe carefully beside me, I complied with his 
request. It ran thus, for as after my friends went it 
was left behind, I have written it down y/ord for 
word : — 



The world-old Fair of Vanity 

Since Bunyan's day has grown discreeter 
No more it flocks in crowds to see 

A blazing Paul or Peter. 

; Not that a single inch it swerves 

From hate of saint, or love of sinner ; 
But martyrs shock aesthetic nerves, 
And spoil the goilt of dinner. 

1 Raise but a shout, or flaunt a scarf — 

Its mobs are all agog and flying ; 
They '11 cram the levee of a dwarf, 
And leave a Haydon dying. 



' They live upon each newest thing, 

They fill their idle days with seeing 
Fresh news of courtier and of king 
Sustains their empty being. 



Books and Gardens. 263 

"The statelier, from year to year, 

Maintain their comfortable stations 
At the wide windows that o'erpeer 
The public square of nations ; 

"While through it heaves, with cheers and groans, 
Harsh drums of battle in the distance, 
Frightful with gallows, ropes, and thrones, 
The medley of existence ; 

" Amongst them tongues are wagging much : 
Hark to the philosophic sisters ! 
To his, whose keen satiric touch, 
Like the Medusa, blisters ! 

" All things are made for talk — St Paul — 
The pattern of an altar cushion — 
A Paris wild Math carnival, 
Or red with revolution, 

"And much they knew, that sneering crew, 
Of things above the world and under : 
They search'd the hoary deep ; they knew 
The secret of the thunder ; 

"The pure white arrow of the light 
They split into its colours seven ; 
They weigh'd the sun ; they dwelt, like night, 
Among the stars of heaven ; 

"They've found out life and death — the first 
Is known but to the upper classes — 
The second, pooh ! 'tis at the worst 
A dissolution into gases. 

" And vice and virtue are akin 

As black and white from Adam issue — 
One flesh, one blood, though sheeted in 
A different -colour 'd tissue. 



264 Books and Gardens. 

"Their science groped from star to star, 

But than herself found nothing greater — 
What wonder ? in a Leyden jar 
They bottled the Creator. 

"Fires flutter'd on their lightning-rod ; 

They clear'd the human mind from error ; 
They emptied heaven of its God, 
And Tophet of its terror. 

"Better the savage in his dance 

Than these acute and syllogistic ! 
Better a reverent ignorance 
Than knowledge atheistic ! 

" Have they dispell'd one cloud that lowers 
So darkly on the human creature ? 
They with their irreligious powers 
Have subjugated nature. 

" But as a satyr wins the charms 
Of maiden in a forest hearted, 
He finds, when clasp'd within his arms, 
The outraged soul departed." 

When I had done reading these verses, the clergy- 
man glanced slyly along to see the effect of his shot. 
The doctor drew two or three hurried whiffs, gave a 
huge grunt of scorn, then turning sharply, asked, 
"What is 'a reverent ignorance?' What is 'a know- 
ledge atheistic?'" The clergyman, skewered by the 
sudden question, wriggled a little, and then began to 
explain — with no great heart, however, for he had had 
his little joke out, and did not care to carry it further. 
The doctor listened for a little, and then, laying down 
his pipe, said with some heat, " It won't do. ' Reverent 



Books and Gardens. 265 

ignorance' and such trash is a mere jingle of words : 
that you know as well as I. You stumbled on these 
verses, and brought them up here to throw them at 
me. They don't harm me in the least, I can assure 
you. There is no use," continued the doctor, molli- 
fying at the sight of his friend's countenance, and 
seeing how the land lay — " there is no use speaking 
on such matters to our incurious, solitary friend here, 
who could bask comfortably in sunshine for a century, 
without once inquiring whence came the light and 
heat. But let me tell you," lifting his pipe and shaking 
it across me at the clergyman, " that science has done 
services to your cloth which have not always received 
the most grateful acknowledgments. Why, man," here 
he began to fill his pipe slowly, " the theologian and 
the man of science, although they seem to diverge and 
lose sight of each other, are all the while working to 
one end. Two exploring parties in Australia set out 
from one point ; the one goes east and the other west. 
They lose sight of each other — they know nothing of 
one another's whereabouts — but they are all steering 
to one point" — the sharp spurt of a fusee on the garden 
seat came in here, followed by an aromatic flavour in 
the air — "and when they do meet, which they are 
certain to do in the long run" — here the doctor put 
the pipe in his mouth, and finished his speech with it 
there — " the figure of the continent has become known, 
and may be set down in maps. The exploring parties 
have started long ago. What folly in the one to 
pooh-pooh, or be suspicious of the exertions of the 



266 . Books and Gardens. 

other. That party deserves the greatest credit which 
meets the other more than halfway." — "Bravo!" 
cried the clergyman, when the doctor had finished 
his oration ; " I don't know that I could fill your 
place at the bed-side, but I am quite sure that you 
could fill mine in the pulpit." — "Lam not sure that 
the congregation would approve of the change — I 
might disturb their slumbers ;" and, pleased with his 
retort, his cheery laugh rose through a cloud of smoke 
into the sunset. 

Heigho ! mine is a dull life, I fear, when this little 
affair of the doctor and the clergyman takes the dignity 
of an incident, and seems worthy of being recorded. 

The doctor was anxious that, during the following 
winter, a short course of lectures should be delivered 
in the village school-room, and in my garden he held 
several conferences on the matter with the clergyman 
and myself. It was arranged finally that the lectures 
should be delivered, and that one of them should be 
delivered by me. I need not say how pleasant was 
the writing out of my discourse, and how the pleasure 
was heightened by the slightest thrill of alarm at my 
own temerity. My lecture I copied out in my most 
careful hand, and, as I had it by heart, I used to 
declaim passages of it ensconced in my moss-house, 
or concealed behind my shrubbery trees. In these 
places I tried it all over sentence by sentence. The 
evening came at last which had been looked forward 
to for a couple of months or more. The small school- 
room was filled by forms on which the people sat, 



Books and Gardens. 267 

and a small reading-desk, with a tumbler of water on 
it, at the further end, waited for me. When I took 
my seat, the couple of hundred eyes struck into me 
a certain awe. I discovered in a moment why the 
orator of the hustings is so deferential to the mob. 
You may despise every individual member of your 
audience, but these despised individuals, in their 
capacity of a collective body, overpower you. I ad- 
dressed the people with the most unfeigned respect. 
When I began, too, I found what a dreadful thing it 
is to hear your own voice inhabiting the silence. You 
are related to your voice, and yet divorced from it. 
It is you, and yet a thing apart. All the time it is 
going on, you can be critical as to its tone, volume, 
cadence, and other qualities, as if it was the voice of 
a stranger. Gradually, however, I got accustomed to 
my voice, and the respect which I entertained for my 
hearers so far relaxed that I was at last able to look 
them in the face. I saw the doctor and the clergy- 
man smile encouragingly, and my half-witted gardener 
looking up at me with open mouth, and the atra- 
bilious confectioner clap his hands, which made me 
take refuge in my paper again. I got to the end of 
my task without any remarkable incident, if I except 
the doctor's once calling out "hear" loudly, which 
brought the heart into my mouth, and blurred half a 
sentence. When I sat down, there were the usual 
sounds of approbation, and the confectioner returned 
thanks in the name of the audience. 



ON VAGABONDS. 

BEING A DISCOURSE DELIVERED BEFORE THE DREAM- 
THORP LITERARY INSTITUTE, SESSION 1862-63. 

/"^ALL it oddity, eccentricity, humour, or what you 
please, it is evident that the special flavour of 
mind or manner, which, independently of fortune, 
station, or profession, sets a man apart and makes 
him distinguishable from his fellows, and which gives 
the charm of picturesqueness to society, is fast dis- 
appearing from amongst us. A man may count the 
odd people of his acquaintance on his fingers ; and it 
is observable that these odd people are generally well 
stricken in years. They belong more to the past 
generation than to the present. Our young men 
are terribly alike. For these many years back the 
young gentlemen I have had the fortune to en- 
counter are clever, knowing, selfish, disagreeable ; the 
young ladies are of one pattern like minted sove- 
reigns of the same reign — excellent gold, I have no 
doubt, but each bearing the same awfully proper 
image and superscription. There are no blanks in 



On Vagabonds. 269 

the matrimonial lottery now-a-days, but the prizes are 
all of a value, and there is but one kind of article 
given for the ticket. Courtship is an absurdity, and a 
sheer waste of time. If a man could but close his 
eyes in a ball-room, dash into a bevy of muslin 
beauties, carry off the fair one that accident gives to 
his arms, his raid would be as reasonable and as 
likely to produce happiness as the more ordinary 
methods of procuring a spouse. If a man has to 
choose one guinea out of a bag containing one hun- 
dred and fifty, what can he do 1 ? What wonderful 
wisdom can he display in his choice ] There is no 
appreciable difference of value in the golden pieces. 
The latest coined are a little fresher, that 's all. An 
act of uniformity, with heavy penalties for recusants, 
seems to have been passed upon the English race. 
That we can quite well account for this state of things, 
does not make the matter better, does not make it 
the less our duty to fight against it. We are apt to 
be told that men are too busy and women too accom- 
plished for humour of speech or originality of char- 
acter or manner. In the truth of this lies the pity of 
it. If, with the exceptions of hedges that divide 
fields, and streams that run as marches between 
farms, every inch of soil were drained, ploughed, 
manured, and under that improved cultivation rush- 
ing up into astonishing wheaten and oaten crops, 
enriching tenant and proprietor, the aspect of the 
country would be decidedly uninteresting, and would 



270 On Vagabonds. 

present scant attraction to the man riding or walking 
through it. In such a world the tourists would be 
few. Personally, I should detest a world all red and 
ruled with the ploughshare in spring, all covered with 
harvest in autumn. I wish a little variety. I desi- 
derate moors and barren places ; the copse where you 
can flush the wood-cock ; the warren where, when you 
approach, you can see the twinkle of innumerable 
rabbit tails ; and, to tell the truth, would not feel 
sorry although Reynard himself had a hole beneath 
the wooded bank, even if the demands of his rising 
family cost Farmer Yellowleas a fat capon or two in 
the season. The fresh, rough, heathery parts of hu- 
man nature, where the air is freshest, and where the 
linnets sing, is getting encroached upon by cultivated 
fields. Every one is making himself and herself use- 
ful. Every one is producing something. Everybody 
is clever. Everybody is a philanthropist. I don't 
like it. I love a little eccentricity. I respect honest 
prejudices. I admire foolish enthusiasm in a young 
head better than a wise scepticism. It is high time, 
it seems to me, that a moral game-law were passed 
for the preservation of the wild and vagrant feelings 
of human nature. 

I have advertised myself to speak of vagabonds, 
and I must explain what I mean by the term. We 
all know what was the doom of the first child born of 
man, and it is needless for me to say that I do not 
wish the spirit of Cain more widely diffused amongst 



On Vagabonds. 271 

my fellow-creatures. By vagabond, I do not mean a 
tramp, or a gipsy, or a thimblerigger, or a brawler 
who is brought up with a black eye before a magis- 
trate of a morning. The vagabond as I have him in 
my mind's eye, and whom I dearly love, comes out of 
quite a different mould. The man I speak of seldom, 
it is true, attains to the dignity of a church-warden ; 
he is never found sitting at a reformed town-council 
board ; he has a horror of public platforms ; he never 
by any chance heads a subscription-list with a dona- 
tion of fifty pounds. On the other hand, he is very 
far from being a " ne'er-do-weel," as the Scotch phrase 
it, or an imprudent person. He does not play at 
"Aunt Sally" on a public race-course; he does not 
wrench knockers from the doors of slumbering citi- 
zens ; he has never seen the interior of a police cell. 
It is quite true, he has a peculiar way of looking at 
many things. If, for instance, he is brought up with 
cousin Milly, and loves her dearly, and the childish 
affection grows up and strengthens in the woman's 
heart, and there is a fair chance for them fighting the 
world side by side, he marries her without too curi- 
ously considering whether his income will pennit him 
to give dinner-parties, and otherwise fashionably see 
his friends. Very imprudent, no doubt. But you 
cannot convince my vagabond. With the strangest 
logical twist, which seems natural to him, he con- 
ceives that he marries for his own sake, and not 
for the sake of his acquaintances, and that the pos- 



272 On Vagabonds. 

session of a loving heart and a conscience void of 
reproach, is worth, at any time, an odd sovereign 
in his pocket. The vagabond is not a favourite 
with the respectable classes. He is particularly 
feared by mammas who have daughters to dispose of 
— not that he is a bad son, or likely to prove a bad 
husband, or a treacherous friend, but somehow gold 
does not stick to his fingers as it does to the fingers 
of some men. He is regardless of appearances. He 
chooses his friends neither for their fine houses nor 
their rare wines, but for their humours, their goodness 
of heart, their capacities of making a joke and of 
seeing one, and for their abilities, unknown often as 
the woodland violet, but not the less sweet for ob- 
scurity. As a consequence his acquaintance is mis- 
cellaneous, and he is often seen at other places than 
rich men's feasts. I do believe he is a gainer by 
reason of his vagrant ways. He comes in contact 
with the queer corners and the out-of-the-way places 
of human life. He knows more of our common 
nature, just as the man who walks through a country, 
and who strikes off the main road now and then to visit 
a ruin, or a legendary cairn of stones, who drops into 
village inns, and talks with the people he meets on 
the road, becomes better acquainted with it than 
the man who rolls haughtily along the turnpike in 
a carriage and four. We lose a great deal by foolish 
hauteur. No man is worth much who has not a 
touch of the vagabond in him. Could I have visited 



On Vagabonds. 273 

London thirty years ago, I would rather have spent 
an hour with Charles Lamb than with any other of its 
residents. He was a fine specimen of the vagabond, 
as I conceive him. His mind was as full of queer 
nooks and tortuous passages as any mansion-house of 
Elizabeth's day or earlier, where the rooms are cosy, 
albeit a little low in the roof ; where dusty stained 
lights are falling on old oaken panelings ; where every 
bit of furniture has a reverent flavour of ancientness ; 
where portraits of noble men and women, all dead 
long ago, are hanging on the walls; and where a 
black-letter Chaucer with silver clasps is lying open 
on a seat in the window. There was nothing modern 
about him. The garden of his mind did not flaunt 
in gay parterres ; it resembled those that Cowley and 
Evelyn delighted in, with clipped trees, and shaven 
lawns, and stone satyrs, and dark, shadowing yews, 
and a sun-dial with a Latin motto sculptured on it, 
standing at the farther end. Lamb was the slave 
of quip and whimsey ; he stuttered out puns to the 
detriment of all serious and improving conversation, 
and twice or so in the year he was overtaken in 
liquor. Well, in spite of these things, perhaps on 
account of these things, I love his memory. For love 
and charity ripened in that nature as peaches ripen on 
the wall that fronts the sun. Although he did not 
blow his trumpet in the corners of the streets, he was 
tried, as few men are, and fell not. He jested that he 
might not weep. He wore a martyr's heart beneath 



274 On Vagabonds. 

his suit of motley. And only years after his death, 
when to admiration or censure he was alike insensible, 
did the world know his story, and that of his sister 
Mary. 

Ah, me ! what a world this was to live in two or 
three centuries ago, when it was getting itself dis- 
covered — when the sunset gave up America, when a 
steel hand had the spoiling of Mexico and Peru! 
Then were the "Arabian Nights" commonplace, en- 
chantments a matter of course, and romance the most 
ordinary thing in the world. Then man was courting 
Nature, now he has married her. Every mystery is 
dissipated. The planet is familiar as the trodden 
pathway running between towns. We no longer gaze 
wistfully to the west, dreaming of the Fortunate Isles. 
We seek our wonders now on the ebbed sea-shore; 
we discover our new worlds with the microscope. 
Yet, for all that time has brought and taken away, 
I am glad to know that the vagabond sleeps in our 
blood and awakes now and then. Overlay human 
nature as you please, here and there some bit of 
rock, or mound of aboriginal soil, will crop out with 
the wild flowers growing upon it, sweetening the air. 
When the boy throws his Delectus or his Euclid aside, 
and takes passionately to the reading of " Robinson 
Crusoe" or Bruce's "African Travels," do not shake 
your head despondingly over him and prophesy evil 
issues. Let the wild hawk try its wings. It will be 
hooded, and will sit quietly enough on the falconer's 



I 



On Vagabonds. 275 

perch ere long. Let the wild horse career over its 
boundless pampas; the jerk of the lasso will bring it 
down soon enough. Soon enough will the snaffle in 
the mouth and the spur of the tamer subdue the high 
spirit to the bridle, or the carriage-trace. Perhaps 
not, and if so, the better for all parties. Once 
more there will be a new man and new deeds in 
the world. For Genius is a vagabond, Art is a vaga- 
bond, Enterprise is a vagabond. Vagabonds have 
moulded the world into its present shape ; they have 
made the houses in which we dwell, the roads on 
which we ride and drive, the very laws that govern 
us. Respectable people swarm in the track of the 
vagabond as rooks in the track of the ploughshare. 
Respectable people do little in the world except stor- 
ing wine-cellars and amassing fortunes for the benefit 
of spendthrift heirs. Respectable well-to-do Grecians 
shook their heads over Leonidas and his three hun- 
dred when they went down to Thermopylae. Respect- 
able Spanish churchmen with shaven crowns scouted 
the dream of Columbus. Respectable German folks 
attempted to dissuade Luther from appearing before 
Charles and the princes and electors of the empire, 
and were scandalised when he declared that "were 
there as many devils in Worms as there were tiles on 
the house-tops, still would he on." Nature makes us 
vagabonds, the world makes us respectable. 

In the fine sense in which I take the word, the 
English are the greatest vagabonds on the earth, and 



276 On Vagabonds. 

it is the healthiest trait in their national character. 
The first fine day in spring awakes the gipsy in the 
blood of the English workman, and incontinently he 
"babbles of green fields." On the English gentleman^ 
lapped in the most luxurious civilisation, and with the 
thousand powers and resources of wealth at his com- 
mand, descends oftentimes a fierce unrest, a Bedouin- 
like horror of cities and the cry of the money-changer, 
and in a month the fiery dust rises in the track of his 
desert steed, or in the six months' polar midnight he 
hears the big wave clashing on the icy shore. The 
close presence of the sea feeds the Englishman's 
restlessness. She takes possession of his heart like 
some fair capricious mistress. Before the boy awakes 
to the beauty of Cousin Mary, he is crazed by the 
fascinations of ocean. With her voices of ebb and 
flow she weaves her siren song round the English- 
man's coasts day and night. Nothing that dwells on 
land can keep from her embrace the boy who has 
gazed upon her dangerous beauty, and who has heard 
her singing songs of foreign shores at the foot of the 
summer crag. It is well that in the modern gentle- 
man the fierce heart of the Berserker lives yet 
The English are eminently a nation of vagabonds. 
The sun paints English faces with all the colours of 
his climes. The Englishman is ubiquitous. He 
shakes with fever and ague in the swampy valley of 
the Mississippi ; he is drowned in the sand pillars as 
they waltz across the desert on the purple breath of 



On Vagabonds. 277 

the simoom ; he stands on the icy scalp of Mont 
Blanc ; his fly falls in the sullen Norwegian fords ; he 
invades the solitude of the Cape lion ; he rides on his 
donkey through the uncausewayed Cairo streets. That 
wealthy people, under a despotism, should be travellers 
seems a natural thing enough. It is a way of escape 
from the rigours of their condition. But that Eng- 
land, — where activity rages so keenly and engrosses 
every class; where the prizes of Parliament, litera- 
ture, commerce, the bar, the church are hungered and 
thirsted after; where the stress and intensity of life 
ages a man before his time ; where so many of the 
noblest break down in harness hardly half-way to the 
goal — should, year after year, send off swarms of men 
to roam the world, and to seek out danger for the 
mere thrill and enjoyment of it, is significant of the 
indomitable pluck and spirit of the race. There is 
scant danger that the rust of sloth will eat into the 
virtue of English steel. The English do the hard 
work and the travelling of the world. The least re- 
volutionary nation of Europe, the one with the great- 
est temptations to stay at home, with the greatest 
faculty for work, with perhaps the sincerest regard for 
wealth, is also the most nomadic. How is this % It is 
because they are a nation of vagabonds ; they have the 
" hungry heart " that one of their poets speaks about. 
There is an amiability about the genuine vaga- 
bond which takes captive the heart. We do not love 
a man for his respectability, his prudence and fore- 



278 On Vagabonds. 

sight in business, his capacity of living within his 
income, or his balance at his banker's. We all admit 
that prudence is an admirable virtue, and occasionally 
lament, about Christmas, when bills fall in, that we do 
not inherit it in a greater degree. But we speak about 
it in quite a cool way. It does not touch us with 
enthusiasm. If a calculating-machine had a hand to 
wring, it would find few to wring it warmly. The 
things that really move liking in human beings are the 
gnarled nodosities of character, vagrant humours, freaks 
of generosity, some little unextinguishable spark of the 
aboriginal savage, some little sweet savour of the old 
Adam. It is quite wonderful how far simple gener- 
osity and kindliness of heart go in securing affection ; 
and, when these exist, what a host of apologists spring 
up for faults and vices even. A country squire goes 
recklessly to the dogs, yet if he has a kind word for 
his tenant when he meets him, a frank greeting for the 
rustic beauty when she drops a curtsy to him on the 
highway, he lives for a whole generation in an odour 
of sanctity. If he had been a disdainful, hook-nosed, 
prime minister, who had carried his country triumph- 
antly through some frightful crisis of war, these people 
would, perhaps, never have been aware of the fact ; 
and most certainly never would have tendered him a 
word of thanks, even if they had. When that important 
question, "Which is the greatest foe to the public 
weal — the miser or the spendthrift 1 ?" is discussed at 
the artisans' debating club, the spendthrift has all 



On Vagabonds. 279 

the eloquence on his side — the miser all the votes. 
The miser's advocate is nowhere, and he pleads the 
cause of his client with only half his heart. In the 
theatre, Charles Surface is applauded, and Joseph 
Surface is hissed. The novel-reader's affection goes 
out to Tom Jones, his hatred to Blifil. Joseph Sur- 
face and Blifil are scoundrels, it is true, but deduct 
the scoundrelism, let Joseph be but a stale proverb- 
monger and Blifil a conceited prig, and the issue re- 
mains the same. Good humour and generosity carry 
the day with the popular heart all the world over. 
Tom Jones and Charles Surface are not vagabonds 
to my taste. They were shabby fellows both, and 
were treated a great deal too well. But there are 
other vagabonds whom I love, and whom I do well 
to love. With what affection do I follow little Ish- 
mael and his broken-hearted mother out into the great 
and terrible wilderness, and see them faint beneath 
the ardours of the sunlight. And we feel it to be 
strict poetic justice and compensation, that the lad so 
driven forth from human tents should become the 
father of wild Arabian men, to whom the air of cities 
is poison, who work not with any tool, and on whose 
limbs no conqueror has ever yet been able to rivet 
shackle or chain. Then there are Abraham's grand- 
children, Jacob and Esau — the former, I confess, no 
favourite of mine. His, up at least to his closing 
years, when parental affection and strong sorrow 
softened him, was a character not amiable. He 



280 On Vagabonds. 

lacked generosity, and had too keen an eye on his 
own advancement. He did not inherit the noble 
strain of his ancestors. He was a prosperous man ; 
yet in spite of his increase in flocks and herds, — in 
spite of his vision of the ladder with the angels ascend- 
ing and descending upon it, — in spite of the success 
of his beloved son, — in spite of the weeping and 
lamentation of the Egyptians at his death, — in spite 
of his splendid funeral, winding from the city by the 
pyramid and the sphinx, — in spite of all these things, 
I would rather have been the hunter Esau, with birth- 
right niched away, bankrupt in the promise, rich only 
in fleet foot and keen spear ; for he carried into the 
wilds with him an essentially noble nature — no brother 
with his mess of pottage could mulct him of that. 
And he had a fine revenge ; for, when Jacob, on his 
journey, heard that his brother was near with four 
hundred men, and made division of his flocks and 
herds, his man-servants and maid-servants, impetuous 
as a swollen hill-torrent, the fierce son of the desert, 
baked red with Syrian light, leaped down upon him, 
and fell on his neck and wept. And Esau said, "What 
meanest thou by all this drove which I met?" and 
Jacob said, "These are to find grace in the sight of 
my lord;" then Esau said, "I have enough, my 
brother ; keep that thou hast unto thyself." O mighty 
prince, didst thou remember thy mother's guile, the 
skins upon thy hands and neck, and the lie put 
upon the patriarch, as, blind with years, he sat up in 



On Vagabonds, 281 

his bed snuffing the savoury meat % An ugly memory, 
I should fancy ! 

Commend me to Shakspeare's vagabonds, the most 
delightful in the world ! His sweet-blooded and liberal 
nature blossomed into all fine generosities as naturally 
as an apple-bough into pink-blossoms and odours. 
Listen to Gonsalvo talking to the shipwrecked Milan 
nobles camped for the night in Prospero's isle, full of 
sweet voices, with Ariel shooting through the enchanted 
air like a falling star : — 

"Had I the plantation of this isle, my lord, 
I' the commonwealth I would by contraries 
Execute all things ; for no kind of traffic 
Would I admit °, no name of magistrate ; 
Letters should not be known ; riches, poverty, 
And use of service none ; contract, succession, 
Bourne, bound of land, tilth, title, vineyard none ; 
No use of metal coin, or wine, or oil ; 
No occupation — all men idle — all ! 
And women too, but innocent and pure ; 
No sovereignty ; 

All things in common nature should produce, 
Without sweat or endurance ; treason, felony, 
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine 
Would I not have ; but nature would bring forth 
Of its own kind all foison, all abundance, 
To feed my innocent people. 
I would with such perfection govern, sir, 
To excel the golden age." 

What think you of a world after that pattern? 
"As You Like It" is a vagabond play, and verily, if 
there waved in any wind that blows a forest peopled 



282 On Vagabonds. 

like Arden's, with an exiled king drawing the sweet- 
est humanest lessons from misfortune ; a melancholy- 
Jacques, stretched by the river bank, moralising on 
the bleeding deer ; a fair Rosalind, chanting her saucy 
cuckoo song ; fools like Touchstone — not like those 
of our acquaintance, my friends ; and the whole place, 
from centre to circumference, filled with mighty oak 
bolls, all carven with lovers' names, — if such a forest 
waved in wind, I say, I would, be my worldly pros- 
pects what they might, pack up at once, and cast in 
my lot with that vagabond company. For there I 
should find more gallant courtesies, finer sentiments, 
completer innocence and happiness, more wit and 
wisdom, than I am like to do here even, though I 
search for them from shepherd's cot to king's palace. 
Just to think how those people lived ! Carelessly as 
the blossoming trees, happily as the singing birds, 
time measured only by the patter of the acorn on the 
fruitful soil! A world without debtor or creditor, 
passing rich, yet with never a doit in its purse, with 
no sordid care, no regard for appearances ; nothing 
to occupy the young but love-making, nothing to 
occupy the old but perusing the "sermons in stones" 
and the musical wisdom which dwells in "running 
brooks!" But Arden forest draws its sustenance 
from a poet's brain : the light that sleeps on its leafy 
pillows is " the light that never was on sea or shore." 
We but please and tantalise ourselves with beautiful 
dreams. 



On Vagabonds. 283 

The children of the brain become to us actual 
existences, more actual indeed than the people who 
impinge upon us in the street, or who live next door. 
We are more intimate with Shakspeare's men and 
women than we are with our contemporaries, and 
they are, on the whole, better company. They are 
more beautiful in form and feature, and they express 
themselves in a way that the most gifted strive after 
in vain. What if Shakspeare's people could walk 
out of the play-books and settle down upon some 
spot of earth and conduct life there ! There would be 
found humanity's whitest wheat, the world's unalloyed 
gold. The very winds could not visit the place 
roughly. No king's court could present you such 
an array. Where else could we find a philosopher 
like Hamlet % a friend like Antonio 1 a witty fellow 
like Mercutio ? where else Imogen's piquant face ? 
Portia's gravity and womanly sweetness 1 ? Rosalind's 
true heart and silvery laughter 1 Cordelia's beauty of 
holiness 1 These would form the centre of the court, 
but the purlieus, how many-coloured ! Malvolio would 
walk mincingly in the sunshine there ; Autolycus would 
filch purses. Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby 
Belch would be eternal boon companions. And as 
Falstaff sets out homeward from the tavern, the portly 
knight leading the revellers like a three-decker a line of 
frigates, they are encountered by Dogberry, who sum- 
mons them to stand and answer to the watch as they 
are honest men. If Mr Dickens's characters were 



284 On Vagabonds. 

gathered together, they would constitute a town popu- 
lous enough to send a representative to Parliament. 
Let us enter. The style of architecture is unparallelled. 
There is an individuality about the buildings. In 
some obscure way they remind one of human faces. 
There are houses sly-looking, houses wicked-looking, 
houses pompous-looking. Heaven bless us ! what a 
rakish pump ! what a self-important town-hall ! what 
a hard-hearted prison ! The dead walls are covered 
with advertisements of Mr Slearey's circus. Newman 
Noggs comes shambling along. Mr and the Misses 
Pecksniff come sailing down the sunny side of the 
street. Miss Mercy's parasol is gay; papa's neck- 
cloth is white, and terribly starched. Dick Swiveller 
leans against a wall, his hands in his pockets, a prim- 
rose held between his teeth, contemplating the opera 
of Punch and Judy, which is being conducted under 
the management of Messrs Codlings and Short. You 
turn a corner and you meet the coffin of little Paul 
Dombey borne along. Who would have thought of 
encountering a funeral in this place? In the after- 
noon you hear the rich tones of the organ from Miss 
La Creevy's first floor, for Tom Pinch has gone to 
live there now; and as you know all the people as 
you know your own brothers and sisters, and conse- 
quently require no letters of introduction, you go up 
and talk with the dear old fellow about all his friends 
and your friends, and towards evening he takes your 
arm, and you walk out to see poor Nelly's grave — a 



On Vagabonds. 285 

place which he visits often, and which he dresses 
with flowers with his own hands. I know this is the 
idlest dreaming, but all of us have a sympathy with 
the creatures of the drama and the novel. Around 
the hardest cark and toil lies the imaginative world 
of the poets and romancists, and thither we some- 
times escape to snatch a mouthful of serener air. 
There our best lost feelings have taken a human 
shape. We suppose that boyhood with its. impulses 
and enthusiasms has subsided with the gray cynical 
man whom we have known these many years. Not 
a bit of it. It has escaped into the world of the poet, 
and walks a love-flushed Romeo in immortal youth. 
We suppose that the Mary of fifty years since, the 
rose-bud of a girl that crazed our hearts, blossomed 
into the spouse of Jenkins, the stockbroker, and 
is now a grandmother. Not at all. She is Juliet 
leaning from the balcony, or Portia talking on the 
moonlight lawns at Belmont. There walk the shadows 
of our former selves. All that Time steals he takes 
thither ; and to live in that world is to live in our lost 
youth, our lost generosities, illusions, and romances. 

In middle-class life, and in the professions, when a 
standard or ideal is tacitly set up, to which every 
member is expected to conform on pain of having 
himself talked about, and wise heads shaken over 
him, the quick feelings of the vagabond are not fre- 
quently found. Yet, thanks to Nature ! who sends her 
leafage and flowerage up through all kinds of debris. 



286 On Vagabonds. 

and who takes a blossomy possession of ruined walls 
and desert places, it is never altogether dead. And of 
vagabonds not the least delightful is he who retains 
poetry and boyish spirits beneath the crust of a pro- 
fession. Mr Carlyle commends " central fire," and 
very properly commends it most when " well covered 
in." In the case of a professional man, this " central 
fire " does not manifest itself in wasteful explosive- 
ness, but in secret genial heat visible in fruits of 
charity and pleasant humour. The physician who 
is a humorist commends himself doubly to a sick- 
bed. His patients are as much indebted for their 
cure to his smile, his voice, and a certain irresistible 
healthfulness that surrounds him, as they are to his 
skill and his prescriptions. The lawyer who is a 
humorist is a man of ten thousand. How easily the 
worldly-wise face puckered over a stiff brief relaxes 
into the lines of laughter. He sees many an evil side 
of human nature, he is familiar with slanders and 
injustice, all kinds of human bitterness and falsity; 
but neither his hand nor his heart becomes " embued 
with that it works in;" and the little admixture of 
acid, inevitable from his circumstances and mode of 
life, but heightens the flavour of his humour. But of 
all humorists of the professional class, I prefer the 
clergyman, especially if he is well stricken in years, 
and has been anchored all his life in a country charge. 
He is none of your loud wits. There is a lady-like 
delicacy in his mind, a constant sense of his holy 



On Vagabonds. 287 

office which warn him off dangerous subjects. This 
reserve, however, does but improve the quality of his 
mirth. What his humour loses in boldness it gains 
in depth and slyness. And as the good man has 
seldom the opportunity of making a joke, or of pro- 
curing an auditor who can understand one, the dewy 
glitter of his eyes, as you sit opposite him, and his 
heartfelt enjoyment of the matter in hand, are worth 
going a considerable way to witness. It is not, how- 
ever, in the professions that the vagabond is com- 
monly found. Over these that awful and ubiquitous 
female, Mrs Grundy — at once Fate, Nemesis, and 
Fury — presides. The glare of her eye is profes- 
sional danger, the pointing of her finger is professional 
death. When she utters a man's name he is lost. 
The true vagabond is to be met with in other walks 
of life, — among actors, poets, painters. These may 
grow in any way their nature directs. They are not 
required to conform to any traditional pattern. With 
regard to the respectabilities and the " minor morals," 
the world permits them to be libertines. Besides, it 
is a temperament peculiarly sensitive, or generous, 
or enjoying, which at the beginning impels these 
to their special pursuits ; and that temperament, like 
everything else in the world, strengthens with use, 
and grows with what it feeds on. We look upon an 
actor, sitting amongst ordinary men and women, with 
a certain curiosity, — we regard him as a creature from 
another planet, almost. His life and his world are 



288 On Vagabonds. 

quite different from ours. The orchestra, the foot- 
lights, and the green baize curtain divide us. He is 
a monarch half his time — his entrance and his exit 
proclaimed by flourish of trumpet. He speaks in 
blank verse, is wont to take his seat at gilded ban- 
quets, to drink nothing out of a pasteboard goblet. 
The actor's world has a history amusing to read, and 
lines of noble and splendid traditions, stretching back 
to charming Nelly's time and earlier. The actor has 
strange experiences. He sees the other side of the 
moon. We roar at Grimaldi's funny face : he sees 
the lines of pain in it. We hear Romeo wish to be 
" a glove upon that hand, that he might touch that 
cheek :" three minutes afterwards he beholds Romeo 
refresh himself with a pot of porter. We see the 
Moor, who "loved not wisely but too well," smother 
Desdemona with the nuptial bolster : he sees them sit 
down to a hot supper. We always think of the actor 
as on the stage : he always thinks of us as in the 
boxes. In justice to the poets of the present day, it 
may be noticed that they have improved on their 
brethren in Johnson's time, who were, according to 
Lord Macaulay, hunted by bailiffs and familiar with 
sponging-houses, and who, when hospitably enter- 
tained, were wont to disturb the household of the 
entertainer by roaring for hot punch at four o'clock 
in the morning. Since that period the poets have 
improved in the decencies of life: they wear broad 
cloth, and settle their tailors' accounts even as other 



On Vagabonds, . 289 

men. At this present moment her Majesty's poets 
are perhaps the most respectable of her Majesty's 
subjects. They are all teetotallers ; if they sin, it is 
in rhyme, and then only to point a moral. In past 
days the poet flew from flower to flower gathering his 
honey, but he bore a sting, too, as the rude hand that 
touched him could testify. He freely gathers his 
honey as of old, but the satiric sting has been taken 
away. He lives at peace with all men — his brethren 
excepted. About the true poet still there is some- 
thing of the ancient spirit — the old "flash and out- 
break of the fiery mind" — the old enthusiasm and 
dash of humorous eccentricity. But he is fast disap- 
pearing from the catalogue of vagabonds — fast getting 
commonplace, I fear. Many people suspect him of 
dulness. Besides, such a crowd of well-meaning, 
amiable, most respectable men have broken down of 
late years the pales of Parnassus, and become squatters 
on the sacred mount, that the claim of poets to be a 
peculiar people is getting disallowed. Never in this 
world's history were they so numerous ; and although 
some people deny that they are poets, few are can- 
tankerous enough or intrepid enough to assert that 
they are vagabonds. The painter is the most agree- 
able of vagabonds. His art is a pleasant one : it 
demands some little manual exertion, and it takes 
him at times into the open air. It is pleasant, too, 
in this, that lines and colours are so much more 
palpable than words, and the appeal of his work to 



290 On Vagabonds. 

his practised eye has some satisfaction in it. He 
knows what he is about. He does not altogether 
lose his critical sense, as the poet does, when famili- 
arity stales his subject, and takes the splendour out of 
his images. Moreover, his work is more profitable 
than the poet's. I suppose there are just as few great 
painters at the present day as there are great poets ; 
yet the yearly receipts of the artists of England far 
exceed the receipts of the singers. A picture can 
usually be painted in less time than a poem can be 
written. A second-rate picture has a certain market 
value — its frame is at least something. A second-rate 
poem is utterly worthless, and no one will buy it on 
account of its binding. A picture is your own ex- 
clusive property : it is a costly article of furniture. 
You hang it on your walls to be admired by all the 
world. Pictures represent wealth : the possession of 
them is a luxury. The portrait-painter is of all men 
the most beloved. You sit to him willingly, and put 
on your best looks. You are inclined to be pleased 
with his work, on account of the strong prepossession 
you entertain for his subject. To sit for one's portrait 
is like being present at one's own creation. It is an 
admirable excuse for egotism. You would not dis- 
course of the falcon-like curve which distinguishes 
your nose, or the sweet serenity of your reposing lips, 
or the mildness of the eye that spreads a light over 
your countenance, in the presence of a fellow-creature 
for the whole world, yet you do not hesitate to express 



On Vagabonds. 291 

the most favourable opinion of the features starting 
out on you from the wet canvas. The interest the 
painter takes in his task flatters you. And when the 
sittings are over, and you behold yourself hanging on 
your own wall, looking as if you could direct king- 
doms or lead armies, you feel grateful to the artist 
He ministers to your self-love, and you pay him his 
hire without wincing. Your heart warms towards him 
as it would towards a poet who addresses you in an 
ode of panegyric, the kindling terms of which — a little 
astonishing to your friends — you believe in your heart 
of hearts to be the simple truth, and, in the matter of 
expression, not over-coloured in the very least. The 
portrait-painter has a shrewd eye for character, and is 
usually the best anecdote-monger in the world. Hh 
craft brings him into contact with many faces, and h * 
learns to compare them curiously, and to extract their 
meanings. He can interpret wrinkles ; he can look 
through the eyes into the man ; he. can read a whole 
foregone history in the lines about the mouth. Be- 
sides, from the good understanding which usually 
exists between the artist and his sitter, the latter is 
inclined somewhat to unbosom himself; little things 
leak out in conversation, not much in themselves, but 
pregnant enough to the painter's sense, who pieces 
them together, and constitutes a tolerably definite 
image. The man who paints your face knows you 
better than your intimate friends do, and has a 
clearer knowledge of your amiable weaknesses, and 



292 On Vagabonds. 

of the secret motives which influence your conduct, 
than you oftentimes have yourself. A good portrait 
is a kind of biography, and neither painter nor bio- 
grapher can carry out his task satisfactorily unless he 
be admitted behind the scenes. I think that the land- 
scape-painter, who has acquired sufficient mastery in 
his art to satisfy his own critical sense, and who is 
appreciated enough to find purchasers, and thereby 
to keep the wolf from the door, must be of all man- 
kind the happiest. Other men live in cities, bound 
down to some settled task and order of life, but he is 
a nomad, and wherever he goes " Beauty pitches her 
tents before him." He is smitten by a passionate love 
for Nature, and is privileged to follow her into her 
solitary haunts and recesses. Nature is his mistress, 
and he is continually making declarations of his love. 
When one thinks of ordinary occupations, how one 
envies him, flecking his oak-tree boll with sunlight, 
tinging with rose the cloud of the morning in which 
the lark is hid, making the sea's swift fringe of foaming 
lace outspread itself on the level sands, in which the 
pebbles gleam for ever wet. The landscape-painter's 
memory is inhabited by the fairest visions: — dawn 
burning on the splintered peaks that the eagles know, 
while the valleys beneath are yet filled with uncertain 
light — the bright-blue morn stretching over miles of 
moor and mountain — the slow up-gathering of the 
bellied thunder-cloud — summer lakes, and cattle knee- 



On Vagabonds. 293 

deep in them — rustic bridges for ever crossed by old 
women in scarlet cloaks — old-fashioned waggons rest- 
ing on the scrubby common, the waggoner lazy and 
wayworn, the dog couched on the ground, its tongue 
hanging out in the heat — boats drawn up on the shore 
at sunset ; the fisher's children looking seawards, the 
red light full on their dresses and faces j farther back, 
a clump of cottages, with bait-baskets about the door, 
and the smoke of the evening meal coiling up into 
the coloured air. These things are for ever with him. 
Beauty, which is a luxury to other men, is his daily 
food. Happy vagabond, who lives the whole summer 
through in the light of his mistress's face, and who 
does nothing the whole winter except recall the splen- 
dour of her smiles ! 

The vagabond, as I have explained and sketched 
him, is not a man to tremble at, or avoid as if he wore 
contagion in his touch. He is upright, generous, 
innocent, is conscientious in the performance of his 
duties ; and if a little eccentric and fond of the open 
air, he is full of good nature and mirthful charity. 
He may not make money so rapidly as you do, but I 
cannot help thinking that he enjoys life a great deal 
more. The quick feeling of life, the exuberance of 
animal spirits which break out in the traveller, the 
sportsman, the poet, the painter, should be more gen- 
erally diffused. We should be all the better and all 
the happier for it. Life ought to be freer, heartier, 



294 On Vagabonds. 

more enjoyable than it is at present. If the profes- 
sional fetter must be worn, let it be worn as lightly 
as possible. It should never be permitted to canker 
the limbs. We are a free people, — we have an un- 
shackled press, — we have an open platform, and can 
say our say upon it, no king or despot making us 
afraid. We send representatives to Parliament; the 
franchise is always going to be extended. All this is 
very fine, and we do well to glory in our privileges as 
Britons. But, although we enjoy greater political 
freedom than any other people, we are the victims of 
a petty social tyranny. We are our own despots — 
we tremble at a neighbour's whisper. A man may 
say what he likes on a public platform — he may 
publish whatever opinion he chooses — but he dare 
not wear a peculiar fashion of hat on the street. 
Eccentricity is an outlaw. Public opinion blows like 
the east wind, blighting bud and blossom on the 
human bough. As a consequence of all this, society 
is losing picturesqueness and variety — we are all grow- 
ing up after one pattern. In other matters than archi- 
tecture past times may be represented by the wonderful 
ridge of the Old Town of Edinburgh, where everything 
is individual and characteristic : the present time by 
the streets and squares of the New Town, where every- 
thing is gray, cold, and respectable ; where every house 
is the other's alter ego. It is true that life is healthier 
in the formal square than in the piled-up picturesque- 



On Vagabonds. 295 

ness of the Canongate, — quite true that sanitary con- 
ditions are better observed, — that pure water flows 
through every tenement like blood through a human 
body, — that daylight has free access, and that the 
apartments are larger and higher in the roof. But 
every gain is purchased at the expense of some loss ; 
and it is best to combine, if possible, the excellences of 
the old and the new. By all means retain the modern 
breadth of light and range of space, — by all means 
have water plentiful and bed-chambers ventilated, — 
but at the same time have some little freak of fancy 
without — some ornament about the door, some device 
about the window — something to break the cold, gray, 
stony uniformity; or, to leave metaphor, which is 
always dangerous ground, — for I really don't wish to 
advocate Ruskinism and the Gothic, — it would be 
better to have, along with our modern enlightenment, 
our higher tastes and purer habits, a greater indi- 
viduality of thought and manner ; better, while retain- 
ing all that we have gained, that harmless eccentricity 
should be respected — that every man should be allowed 
to grow in his own way, so long as he does not infringe 
on the rights of his neighbour, or insolently thrust him- 
self between him and the sun. A little more air 
and light should be let in upon life. I should think 
the world has stood long enough under the drill of 
Adjutant Fashion. It is hard work; the posture is 
wearisome, and Fashion is an awful martinet, and has 



296 On Vagabonds. 

a quick eye, and comes down mercilessly on the un- 
fortunate wight who cannot square his toes to the 
approved pattern, or who appears upon parade with 
a darn in his coat, or with a shoulder-belt insufficiently 
pipe-clayed. It is killing work. Suppose we try 
"standing at ease" for a little ! 



THE END. 



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